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2024-03-29T12:24:41Z
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Give a Man a Gun: The story of Carmine DiBiase
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/give-a-man-a-gun-the-story-of-carmine-dibiase
2012-03-17T13:00:00.000Z
2012-03-17T13:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/give-a-man-a-gun-the-story-of-carmine-dibiase"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237016697,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237016697?profile=original" width="530" /></a>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>Carmine DiBiase went out on Christmas Day and got drunk. Very drunk. Very, very drunk. And then he shot and killed someone.</p>
<p>Not just any old someone, but a best friend someone. A guy who had stood by Carmine at his wedding, as his chief attendant. Been godfather to one of his children. Was his business partner.</p>
<p>A man who was also so drunk, he never even saw the bullets coming.</p>
<p>Carmine then became famous not so much for shooting dead his best friend. More for being a celebrity of sorts. The Federal Bureau of Investigation sorts.</p>
<p>They chased him and tried to nail him down for years. Even put him up on their Top Wanted List on May 28th 1956, at number ninety-eight, where he would remain for two years. He may well have been the one and only Italian-American mob guy who graduated into this eccentric catalogue of most wanted criminals (at least until the inclusion of Cleveland’s Anthony Liberatore twenty-one years later) and then stayed there longer than most of the common or garden thugs, serial killers, robbers and traditional malcontent anarchists that traditionally populated its archives.</p>
<p>He also hit it big twenty years later when he was, it seems, the shooter, or at least one of them, who sent Joey Gallo, the Hamlet of organized crime, off on his last journey into the great unknown, after scungilli marinara as appetiser, followed by a dessert of .32 and .38 caliber bullets.</p>
<p>And then, just like in the years before, after killing his best friend, Carmine did a runner. But this time, he never came back. As far as we know. Except maybe once.</p>
<p>Carmine stood five eight and weighed in at two hundred and ten. So he was big without being tall. He had wavy black hair and brown eyes, a Bodhisattva smile and a police record that dated back to 1940 when he was eighteen.</p>
<p>On October 5th, Di. Biase and a close neighborhood friend, Salvatore Granello who would grow up to be a mobbed up guy, and known throughout his life as Solly or Sally Burns, tried to rob a tailor, Mike Bakalian, at 558 Hudson Street. The attempt failed, and even this early in his life DiBiase illustrated his propensity for violence by pistol-whipping the victim eight times.</p>
<p>Carmine was arrested and convicted of attempted robbery and sentenced to a serve a term in the State Vocational Institution at Coxsackie. He came out, but didn’t get any better at his chosen profession.</p>
<p>According to police reports he was known in his neighbourhood as a thug and a bully, with a vicious temper; he hung out at the local bars around Mulberry, Elizabeth, Hester and Mott Streets, his preference as a tipple being a good Scotch whisky. A flashy dresser, he was known in the area as a ladies’ man. He had a scar on his left temple and upper lip, and above his wrist on one arm, a tattoo: Pinto 1949.</p>
<p>He dressed like a text-book hood: open-neck shirt, in silk of course, gold necklace on display over hairy chest, pointed-toe featherweight Italian shoes, highly buffed, silk socks and monogrammed underwear. A macho guy who dressed like a gay hairdresser, but who hefted a roscoe instead of a blow-dryer.</p>
<p>He may also have displayed classic psychopath tendencies - charm, narcissism, egotism and manipulation. Probably a standard set of personality traits for anyone hoping to be successful in the murky world of the New York Mafia.</p>
<p>Pete Diapolous, the bodyguard of Joey Gallo claimed:</p>
<p>He was no big earner or mover. Sober he was nothing, but drunk, he would blow your head off.</p>
<p>In February 1944, he was back inside again, this time at Elmira State Reformatory, starting another five years for the same kind of crime. He came out again, and seemed to either get somewhat improved at his job, or gave crime away, for the time being at least. The cops in New York thought of Carmine as a peanut punk, the kind of hood who would probably never amount to much. He’d been arrested eight times, including the two that sent him away. Maybe it was in prison that like Joey Gallo, a man to whom he would be forever linked, Carmine DiBiase became a voracious reader devouring books by Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka , among others.</p>
<p>His parents, Gustave and Lena, were first generation immigrants from Italy, and he lived with them and his brother Gaetano, in Little Italy in Lower Manhattan.</p>
<p>He got married, had two children, and worked as a machinist, or a millwright, and then sometimes as a painter and a plumber’s helper, a salesman and once, as a shipping clerk. For a while he became of all things, a tailor. Like almost every guy in the underworld trade, he had a nickname. Many in fact. At times he called himself Carmine De or Carmine Vincent, or Ernest Pinto or just plain Sonny. But to most people in the underworld of New York, he was simply Sonny Pinto. In his early days, he had a look somewhat of the well-known movie star of the period, Victor Mature.</p>
<p>Insert here image of Carmine DiBiase as a young man 1950s.</p>
<p>Then came Christmas, 1951.</p>
<p>Carmine had taken over the lease on the first floor of a building at 167 Mulberry Street, along with Michael Mikey Evans Errichiello, his best friend. They turned it into a bar and meeting place, calling it The Mayfair Boys Civic and Social Club. Like most of these places that dotted the streets of New York, it was a den that catered to crooks, thieves, vagabonds and workers of the night. It never obtained a liquor license, but served booze to its clients until the wee small hours of the morning. It had battered tin ceilings, a bar, a pool table, and tables and chairs scattered around the scarred wood-planked floor. The Copacabana it was not.</p>
<p>Errichiello was a convicted gambler, with a string of arrests for assault, robbery and vagrancy. Peas in a pod were Carmine and Mikey. Until something went very bad in their relationship.</p>
<p>A few days before Christmas, the two friends had an argument. A big one and a bad one according to witnesses. People walking on the street past the club heard the two men shouting and yelling at each other. No one knew for sure just what it was about, but the word going around was that Mikey Evans had been cheating some of the guys playing cards in the club, and worse - had been siphoning off money collected by the club’s poker machines. More for him, less for Sonny. Everything went wrong. Hard to fix. It was like shaking a box of old watch pieces and hoping to pick out a Vacheron Constantin.</p>
<p>It never happens.</p>
<p>The events that unfolded in the early hours of December 26th are based on the testimony of a young, sixteen year old street kid called Joey Luparelli, and the evidence gathered by the police at the scene of the crime, as well as court documents.</p>
<p>Luparelli, known by his street name of Joe Pesh, would grow up to be a criminal associate of the New York Mafia Colombo Crime Family and be present, by some strange quirk of fate at another shooting, twenty-one years into the future, and a block and a half south of The Mayfair Boys, again involving Carmine DiBiase.</p>
<p>Carmine claimed he had spent Christmas day at his home, an apartment at 110 Grand Street, then he had gone to his mother-in-law’s where he stayed until late, before returning to his own place. About 1:00 am he had gone uptown to meet some friends at The Town Crest Bar and Grill. He stayed there for some time, before heading back to Little Italy and the club. There, he found his friend Michael Errichiello dead, and called the police. He claimed he was so drunk he could not remember anything about that night.</p>
<p>The cops came and did what cops do. They looked at the body, slumped in a chair, perforated three times, measured up the place, flashed the pics and took statements from any witnesses still around this time of the morning.</p>
<p>Joe Luparelli, sixteen, lived in an apartment across the street from the club with his mother and sister. His parents were first time immigrants, into New York from Sicily. There were seven kids in the family. The father died when Joe was still a boy, and he grew up wild on the streets like so many of his friends. He got to know the mob guys who infested the area like cockroaches on the hunt. Always on the hunt for something.</p>
<p>In Joe’s days they used to call them gangsters and they all lived by the same code:<br /> Mind your business. Close your eyes. See nothing. Hear nothing.</p>
<p>Joe claimed he was a good kid, as in good at cheating and stealing rather than being good-behaved. That’s what the mob guys were looking for in the street kids.</p>
<p>Christmas Eve, 1951, Joe Luparelli spent at home with his family, then went to the movies with some of his friends. Gene Kelly, the great Irish-American song and dance man in An American in Paris, pure escapism on the most diversionary night of the year. He went back to Mulberry Street about three in the morning and decided to visit the club. This early, there were only three people there. Rocky Tisi who owned a nearby tavern was playing pool with a guy known as Pretty Willie, who worked at the clubhouse, and Errichiello, who was asleep at the bar, his head resting on his folded arms.</p>
<p>Joe hung around watching the pool game and then the door opened and Sonny Pinto looked in, caught Joe’s eye and beckoned him to come outside into the street. He asked Joe to go to a nearby apartment at 13 Elizabeth Street, and wake up one of his gangster friends, a man called Alphonse Sonny Red Indelicato and get him to bring down to the club the guns Sonny Red was holding for him.</p>
<p>In due course, twenty year old Indelicato arrived at the address with a paper bag containing two revolvers, and he and Sonny Pinto went into the club. The two men playing pool, dropped their cues and ran for the door. Carmine DiBiase started shooting at his sleeping friend, hitting him three times, in the head, stomach and the heart, killing him instantly. As Rocky and Pretty Willie scrambled to get of the doorway, Indelicato fired at them, but his aim was off, and he only managed to wound Tisi in the ankle by clubbing him with the gun.</p>
<p>Luparelli (right), the young boy of the streets, Joe Fish to everyone in Little Italy, the kid who ran errands for Mickey and Sonny, found himself trapped in a vortex of necessity. Carmine DiBiase’s future would depend on Joe Luparelli’s silence, and Joe’s life would depend on the premise that Sonny would trust Joe to keep his mouth shut.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237017653,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237017653,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237017653?profile=original" width="219" /></a>When the homicide detectives started looking for DiBiase, he did a runner, and disappeared for seven years. The New York Police department listed him as their number five on the Top Ten List the city kept, and it was on May 28th 1956 that he made the F.B.I. most wanted list.</p>
<p>The newspapers were less than kind in the coverage they gave Sonny Pinto. One called him a rat-face, bowlegged thug, and another referred to him looking like a roast suckling pig.</p>
<p>Tisi eventually rolled and gave the New York police details about the two Sonnys and their involvement in the shootings at the clubhouse. The police placed Rocky into protective custody and he stayed there for seven years, a New York record which still stands to this day.</p>
<p>Indelicato was subsequently tried and convicted for his part in the murder of Mickey Evans and sentenced to twelve years, to be served in Sing Sing Prison.</p>
<p>Carmine DiBiase was indicted for the murder of Michael Errichiello in 1952, but was long gone. The F.B.I. put out a bulletin on him referring to him as a man who will kill without provocation.</p>
<p>He lived in some kind of self-imposed exile, either in New York or somewhere else for seven years, and then in August 1958, accompanied by his lawyer, the famous Maurice Edelbaum, he handed himself into the New York police. At one stage in his absence, he had allegedly lived with Rusty Rastelli, a soldier in the Bonanno Mafia family.</p>
<p>Following his surrender, Carmine DiBiase reportedly made the following statement:</p>
<p>I am getting older and accomplishing nothing having to stay away from my wife and children, mother and father. I am glad it is over. I had to come in.</p>
<p>Edelbaum, a short, fat man, always seemingly dressed in a rumpled suit, represented whole dynasties of Mafia executives including Vito Genovese, Natale Evola, John Franzese, Carmine Perisco, Joseph Bonanno and Vincent Gigante to name a few, and also played a major role in defending the hierarchy rounded up at the great Mafia gabfest at Apalachin in 1957. He was one of the best and most expensive, but even he could not save Carmine, although in a way, in the end, he did.</p>
<p>DiBiase came to trial, was convicted on May 3rd 1959, and sentenced to death in the electric chair by Judge Michael D. Schweitzer. All death penalty convictions in New York were subject to mandatory appeal and his was heard a year later, in February, 1960 and decided that April.</p>
<p>One of the judges hearing the appeal stated:</p>
<p><em>I turn to the other ground for reversal. Some years after he had been indicted, the defendant was surrendered by his lawyer to the authorities in New York County. Under our system of law and justice, an indictment must be followed by</em><br /> <em>arraignment and trial and, in the present case, it is obvious that the defendant's voluntary surrender was designed to assure him a prompt arraignment, with all of its consequent advantages. The defendant had a right to the effective aid and assistance of the attorney who represented him. The fact that his attorney surrendered him for such arraignment in court could not possibly be regarded as a consent or invitation to secret interrogation by police or prosecutor or a waiver of fundamental rights. It matters not, therefore, that the defendant did not object to being questioned or insist on the presence of his lawyer. The damaging statements made by the defendant during the course of his illegal interrogation by the police and District Attorney should not have been received in evidence.</em></p>
<p>In essence, having surrendered to the law, Carmine DiBiase should have had his lawyer present when any statement or evidence was taken from him by the arresting police officers. By being absent, Maurice Edelbaum effectively guaranteed his client grounds for appeal, which in fact is what happened. Whether by luck or cunning, the lawyer won his client’s appeal, and Carmine DiBiase was granted a new trial.</p>
<p>The records of this are archived and not obtainable, at least to this writer, but the defendant walked from court a free man on March 1st 1961. It was a remarkable about-face. A man convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, two years later after a re-trial left the courthouse a free man, ready to go back onto the streets and do what he did best-be a criminal.</p>
<p>It was claimed that Matty Ianiello, a powerful crew boss in the Genovese family had helped Carmine DiBiase when he went on the lam after shooting Michael Errichiello, and that Ianiello had paid the attorney fees for Sonny.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237017890,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237017890,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237017890?profile=original" width="132" /></a>And for the next eleven years there is not much on record about Carmine DiBiase (right).</p>
<p>Harold Konigsberg, a Jewish, freelance hit man for the mob, claimed that DiBiase and Joe Yacovelli had staked out and killed Ali Waffa, the fearsome Arab bodyguard of mobster Joey Gallo, when Ali returned from a sea journey to the Hoboken docks, in July 1963.</p>
<p>A confidential informant notified his FBI handler that DiBiase had been involved in the murder of Michael Granello, who was the son of his boyhood crime capers partner, Solly Burns.</p>
<p>Michael was found shot dead in an auto on 86th Street and Riverside Drive, in 1968. A drug addict, he had been holding up and robbing made men, including on one occasion beating almost to death, with a baseball bat, a mobster called Caserta. Solly, who had allegedly headed up the mob’s enforcement arm overseeing their casino interests in Cuba prior to Castor’s revolution, swore vengeance against his killers. He disappeared in 1970 and was also presumed murdered.</p>
<p>Granello's body found in car 6 Oct 70 at East River Dr. & Hudson St. He was last seen on the 24th September; the FBI claimed he was killed on the 25th at an Elizabeth St. coffeehouse (between Hudson & Prince, perhaps the 8th Ward Pleasure Club, 2623-264 Elizabeth) by Vince Generoso for Thomas Eboli. Granello and Eboli, it was alleged, were at one time competing to succeed Vito Genovese, the boss of the family until his death in prison in 1969, and it was Eboli who ordered the December 1968 hit on Michael Granello for dealing in narcotics, not for his activities in robbing and beating Casserta. The FBI suspected Salvatore Granello was set up by one Jim Corallo and that the garrotted and shot body was allowed to be found because he was on bail. This information would almost certainly have been passed onto the FBI by one of their many CI’s.</p>
<p>There is an FBI report from 1969 that shows DiBiase was a suspect in running an illegal card game venue at 209 West 79th Street, in partnership with some men who were well know to the police department in New York - Victor Tramaglino, Charlie Blum, Hugh Mulligan, Stanley Ackerman and Spanish Raymond Margques - a hotchpotch of the New York underworld - Italian, Irish, Jewish and Hispanic - a mini United Nations of crime.</p>
<p>Tramaglino was listed as a close friend of Carmine Sonny Pinto DiBiase in an earlier, February 5th 1963 FBI internal memo which lists 347 suspected Mafia members operating in New York requesting individual investigations to be carried out on them.</p>
<p>There were other FBI reports that indicated Carmine DiBiase was working under Matty Ianiello and Anthony Strollo a close confident of Vito Genovese.</p>
<p>DiBiase was now a made man in the Genovese Mafia crime family and was still listed as such in a Congressional report on organized crime in 1988, although most sources claim he was part of the Colombo crime family..</p>
<p>According to Luparelli, Carmine dabble in drug trafficking, heroin being his narcotic of choice for sale. He was also involved, according to Luparelli, in the murder of Joseph Visconi, a bouncer in The Wagon Wheels Bar on Broadway who had carried out a robbery on a man called Frank Yacovelli who just happened to be the brother of Joe Joe Yack Yacovelli, a high ranking member of the family administration in the Colombo crime family. Thinking he was going to buy discounted stolen American Express cheques, he was ambushed and killed in an apartment in Little Italy, on Elizabeth Street, by a group of men that also included Sonny Indelicate, DiBiase’s co-conspirator in the killing of Mickey Evans.</p>
<p>By the end of the 1960s, DiBiase and his wife were living in an apartment in Southbridge Towers at 90 Beekman Street in the South Street Seaport District in Lower Manhattan.</p>
<p>He was also involved in a particular brutal and sordid double-murder that took place on the last night of 1970.</p>
<p>On New Year’s Eve, Joseph Fatty Russo held a party at his home on Packanack Lake, in Wayne County, New Jersey. An affluent crook, he was connected into the New York Mafia by an uncle who was a member of one of the five crime families. Fatty himself grew up around Mulberry Street and had allegedly generated his considerable wealth through drug trafficking. He had known Sonny Pinto most of his life.</p>
<p>Sometime after midnight, the party went badly wrong.</p>
<p>Russo had hired two black people to wait on his guests. One was Charles Shepard, a local man, thirty-one year old part-time musician and bar tender. The other, was his common-in-law wife, Shirley Green, who worked as a waitress, and lived in Manhattan. There were over thirty people attending, including children. The party was held in the large basement area of the property. By the end of the night, Russo was either drunk or stoned or a combination of the two, and he noticed that Shepard was drinking his booze, and even worse, dancing and trying to make out with the wife of his nephew.</p>
<p>Incensed, he stormed upstairs into his bedroom where he kept a loaded .38 calibre hand gun, came tumbling back down the stairs and in front of the entire party, emptied the gun into Shepard, killing him instantly. The chaos that erupted must have been electrifying. While some of the guests held a struggling and screaming Shirley, Russo then staggered back to his bedroom, found his ammunition box, re-loaded the gun and went back down to the basement where he shot Shirley six times in the head.</p>
<p>The guests were hustled away to their homes, and along with three of his remaining friends, Russo carried the two bodies to a car which was driven to Pine Brook Road in Montville about fifteen miles away, and the two dead bodies were dumped unceremoniously into snow drifts that lined the street. They were discovered there the first day of January, and the New Jersey police mounted an investigation.</p>
<p>By the time the detectives assigned to the enquiry had traced the shooting to Russo’s home, he had moved to Florida. As the police dug deeper, they discovered that all the guests present that night in New Jersey were also in Florida, on an expense-paid holiday, courtesy of Fatty. Also down for the sun and R & R was Sonny Pinto.</p>
<p>When Russo was finally arrested and charged with the murders of Shephard and Green, he turned to Carmine Persico, a powerful capo or crew boss in the Colombo family, who assured him that the case could be fixed through the family’s connections and control of crooked law enforcement and judicial officers.</p>
<p>Russo was in fact tried twice for the double murders, but was acquitted on both occasions. Federal Organized Crime Strike Force investigators had tapped telephone calls between Russo, Joe Yacovelli, and Carmine DiBiase, which indicated that Russo was being offered help and assistance to evade or avoid prosecution in the murders.</p>
<p>On August 8th, 1972, Federal warrants were issued against all three men on charges of conspiracy. On November the 13th, all of the men were indicted for conspiring to enable Russo to avoid prosecution for murder. In September 1973, a mistrial was declared in the case of Russo and Persico. By then, both Yacovelli and DiBiase were fugitives from justice.</p>
<p>Less than a year down the track, Sonny Pinto would find himself in another murder conspiracy. One that would echo a lot more loudly across the canyons of New York than the sordid killings in New Jersey.</p>
<p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/mafia-rebel-crazy-joey-gallo">Joseph Gallo</a> was a mobster who transcended the gun and the knife and became, literally, a legend in his lifetime. An unlikely mover in the counterculture revolution of the early 1970s in New York, he went where no gangster had gone before. He fancied himself as an artist and Greenwich Village intellectual, hanging out with beatniks, show business celebrities, poets and artists, talking Existentialism and Marxism, and taking on the establishment which in his own peculiar universe was something called the Mafia. Out of Radical Chic bloomed Mafia Chic with Joey Gallo becoming something of an above-ground social entity.</p>
<p>He was Tommy Udo, the giggling psycho, writ large. The Kiss of Death morphed from a celluloid nightmare into a real life one, dark suit, white tie and all, who stalked the streets of Brooklyn and gave his brethren in the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-original-new-york-mafia-family-boss-giuseppe-profaci">Joseph Profaci</a> mob crime family a big dose of heartburn.</p>
<p>As one commentator put it:</p>
<p><em>Joey had a terminal case of the twofers - too far, too fast.</em></p>
<p>Crazy Joe, sometimes called Joe the Blond was a pain up the ass of the Brooklyn based Profaci Mafia clan. Its management hated his loud mouth, louche attitude, polemical approach and egregious manners. In a word, he was their nemesis, and had to be sorted.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237017478,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237017478,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237017478?profile=original" width="131" /></a>One of his own brothers had nicknamed him Crazy Joe (right) and it stuck. A skinny little runt at five six and one forty five pounds, he went off like fireworks when the wrong kind of thing lit him up. It seemed that in order to earn a livelihood he had to be a lively hood. One of his best friends and his bodyguard, Pete Diapolous, referred to him as <em>a vicious, immoral killer possessed of a certain kind of charm when in a good mood, but undeniably dangerous.</em></p>
<p>New York Post reporter Pete Hamill saw him <em>as dressed in a zoot suit, but the eyes were ancient…eyes devoid of time or any conventional sense of pity or remorse…. He would joke with the cops and smile for the reporters, but the eyes never changed…tormented eyes.</em></p>
<p>His second wife, Sina Essary, a former nun, recalled that <em>You could see the remnants of what had been a strikingly handsome man in his youth.</em> She remembers, <em>He had beautiful features—beautiful nose, beautiful mouth and piercing blue eyes, that seemed to range from the colour of slush to the colour of fogged blue steel.</em></p>
<p>Always the eyes. Everyone noticed that about Crazy Joe. <em>They watched everything</em>, according to Hamill.</p>
<p>Jimmy Breslin the New York crime historian, reporter and novelist, wrote a book about him, called The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, which was made into a movie that starred Broadway star Jerry Orbach, who one day would become a good friend of Joe; Bob Dylan wrote a song about him in 1976, and two years after his death, a movie called Crazy Joe came out with Peter Boyle portraying him. It seemed somehow that Joey simply overdosed on the public’s perception of his fame and reputation, alive or dead.</p>
<p>An editor at Viking Press wanted him to write a book. It would be a sensation the publisher said. Joey said, <em>There's something suicidal about publishers paying a lot of greens for the big nothing.</em> Perhaps he thought it was too much work. Perhaps while ploughing through his ten books a week while in prison, which had included Sartre and Camus and Nietzsche, he had noted what Robert Louis Stephenson had said about <em>young writers having to read like predators</em> and there was so much more to do in whatever years he had left.</p>
<p>Born in June, 1929, in Brooklyn, to Albert Gallo and Mary Nunziato, he had two sisters, and two brothers-- Larry and Albert. They grew up on East 4th Street in Brooklyn, between Ditmas Avenue and Cortelyou Road in Kensington. The brothers were to be gangsters just like Joey. They worked together and ran a street crew called The Cockroach Gang terrorizing the neighbourhood of 4th Avenue and Sackets Street.</p>
<p>Donald Goddard saw him as a circus freak dressed in gangster’s clothes.</p>
<p>In an interview with him, Joey stated that he <em>had travelled with bums from the time he was nine. At eleven, he was running a crap game, and when he was thirteen, running his gang. They were his people, and he lived on the streets. And then, they were giving him the slips and he’s running numbers, and then people were getting to hear about Joey’s floating crap game.</em></p>
<p>His first wife, Effie, thought he was too feeling, too humane. <em>He wasn’t very good at what he did….his instincts were all clouded up.</em></p>
<p>After numerous scuffles with the law, although he was only arrested once for burglary in 1950, and had never been in prison, Joey joined the navy at seventeen, but was out in six months, discharged as being emotionally immature, egocentric and demanding.</p>
<p>He became a protégé of a mobster called Frank Frankie Shots Abbatemarco, a Bensonhurst-based big league bookie and the major policy banker in the crime Mafia crime family headed by <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-original-new-york-mafia-family-boss-giuseppe-profaci">Joe Profaci</a> who was based in South Brooklyn and had headed up his clan since the late 1920s.</p>
<p>Larry was already in Team Frankie Shots, and Joey and his two brothers using the clout and protection of Abbatemarco, gradually built up their own street gang of thugs and extortionists pushing their jukeboxes into bars and cafés across the teeming streets of the second biggest city in America and running extortion scams across the boroughs. It became known in the New York underworld as The International Mob, and consisted of a Greek, two Syrians, an Egyptian, a Jew, a Puerto Rican, an Irishman and by necessity, some Italians. It also at one time included a dwarf called Armando Mando Illiano, and if we believe the legend, a lion called Cleo who was kept in the cellar of Armando’s café. He was apparently a great discourager to late payers on the vig they owed the gang on their street loans.</p>
<p>Sometime in the 1950s, the elder brothers (Albert was the kid in the group) were inducted into the Profaci family; according to FBI informant Greg Scarpa, around 1956, becoming made men, their mythical buttons proudly displayed to those who understood the solipsistic rhythms of the streets of New York. A mob guy was like a paladin, an advocate of the benefits of bad over good. Their guiding philosophy may well have been, to quote Oscar Wilde: <em>The best way to overcome temptation is to succumb to it.</em></p>
<p>Scarpa claimed they were introduced into the Profaci family by Johnny Scimone, an old time mob guy. Charlie Lo Cicero, the family consigliere opposed them from day one, considering them too much trouble (and he was certainly proved right in that respect) but he was overruled as it was perceived that they were good earners, perhaps the most paramount quality in prospective mob members.</p>
<p>Joey and his gang were often used by Profaci for the dirty work that was required from time to time around the mob in Brooklyn, and it was alleged he once stabbed a man to death with an ice pick. In October, 1959, the squad was put to use in the killing of Frankie Shots himself.</p>
<p>Profaci had a reputation as a tight-fisted wad and a boss who would use you then kill you. Pete Diapolous claimed he was more feared in the ranks of the New York Mafia than even the Mad Hatter himself - Albert Anastasia.</p>
<p>Profaci demanded off all his men a share of their revenue, maybe as much as a third from his capi, and when Frankie Shots reneged on the demand, Profaci had him whacked. Frankie and his crew were raking in up to seven thousand dollars each and every day and he had no intention of sliding over 30% of the net to the boss. The Gallos used their little, fat and fearsome torpedo, Joseph Joe Jelly Gioielli for the job, and he and a partner (probably his closest friend, Vincent The Sicilian Gugliaro) shot Abbatemarco nine times, leaving the victim sprawled in careless confusion on the floor of his cousin, Anthony Cardiello’s Tavern, at 256 4th Avenue and Carrol Street, late on the day of November 4th, 1959.</p>
<p>Following the killing of Abbatermarco, Joey and his gang assumed Profaci would allow them to take over Shot’s massive policy bank as a reward for doing Joe‘s dirty work. It didn’t happen.</p>
<p>Profaci was angry that Joey had not arranged to killing of Abbatermarco’s son, Tony, who he considered a threat to the family’s stability on the basis that he would probably seek revenge for the death of his father, and as a result, by-passed the Gallos and passed the numbers business over to his underboss and brother-in-law, Joe Magliocco.</p>
<p>The Gallos decided to resolve the problem the only way they really know how to - with violence. A maverick in his strange underworld and a cowboy with attitude, Joey had no intention of kneeling in respectful supplication at the feet of the elderly Mafiosi who controlled his destiny. As John Tuohy wrote it, <em>to the Gallos, it was going to war over cash and common respect.</em></p>
<p>Although their group never numbered more than twenty to twenty-five, they went up against Joe Profaci and his Mafia family, an entity of over two hundred made men and hundreds more associates. This Mafia war raged across the streets of Brooklyn from 1960 until late in 1963.</p>
<p>The first audacious move on the part of the Gallo gang was to kidnap Joe Profaci. But as he was in Florida when they made their play, they had to settle instead for four of his senior men - Joe Magliocco, John Scimone, Profaci’s personal bodyguard, Profaci’s brother, Frank and a relatively unknown capo called Joe Colombo. The men were eventually released on the basis of promises made by Profaci, none of which materialized.</p>
<p>On August 21st 1961, Larry Gallo was ambushed and almost murdered in the Sarah Lounge on Utica Avenue, his life being saved by the timely arrival of NYPD Sergeant Meagher, patrolling the area with officer Melvin Blei. Sometime either just before or after the abortive hit on Larry Gallo, Joe Jelli the gang’s ace hit man, disappeared and was presumed killed and dumped at sea. His wife notified the police of his disappearance on August 31st. His killer may have been Salvatore Sally D D'Ambrosio, who himself was probably murdered eight years later. He disappeared from a Bensonhurst social club, although his bloodstained shirt was later found there by police investigators.</p>
<p>The war dragged on for over two years with car bombings and shootings filling the New York newspaper headlines. In January, 1962, Joey Gallo was indicted, tried and convicted on extortion charges and sentenced to up to fourteen years in prison. The judge at sentencing stated that <em>Joey Gallo has an utter contempt for the law and is a menace to society.</em></p>
<p>Later in the same month, seven members of the gang, leaving a restaurant, saw smoke coming out of a window at 72 President Street. Rushing into the building, the group which consisted of Albert and Larry Gallo, Frank Punchy Illiano, Anthony Abbatermarco, Alfonso Peanuts Serantonio, Leonard Dello and John Commarato, found six children in a smoke filled apartment on the top floor and rescued them. No one was injured and for a few brief days, the Gallo gang were front page news and local heroes. They even made it into Life magazine. When interviewed by the press, Albert Gallo said:</p>
<p><em>We only did what any red-blooded American boys would do.</em></p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237019280,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237019280,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237019280?profile=original" width="750" /></a>Tony Abbatermarco. Albert Gallo and Frank Illiano with children rescued from President Street fire in January 1962</p>
<p>Five months later, Joe Profaci died of cancer and in due course his crime family was taken over by Joseph Colombo, the obscure capo who had been one of the group kidnapped by the Gallo’s early in 1961.</p>
<p>In March, 1971, Joey came out of prison, divorced his wife Jeffe, met another woman called Sina Essary, a dental technician, who was an ex novice nun, married her, moved from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village, immersed himself in the counter culture revolution, socialized with actors and writers and artists and on April 6th 1972 celebrated his last birthday, his 43rd in the process becoming an entry on a New York Police blotter: Homicide GUN at 5:20.</p>
<p>While imprisoned in Attica, Joey had been diagnosed as suffering from pseudo psychopathic schizophrenia. His response to the doctors report was typical Joey:</p>
<p><em>Fuck You.</em></p>
<p><em>Things are not right or wrong anymore. Just smart or stupid. You don’t judge an act by its nature. You judge it by results. We’re all criminals now…..Things exist when I feel they should exist, okay? Me, I am the world!</em></p>
<p>Joey Gallo may well have suffered from what the German’s referred to as machbarkeitswahn: fantasies of omnipotence.</p>
<p>Wayne Christeson of Tennessee, wrote in an article on Sinna Essary:</p>
<p>……<em>While Joey was still languishing in prison, his old enemy Joe Profaci died. Control of the Profaci mob passed to Joe Colombo, one of the “new” Mafia dons who knew something about politics and public relations. He formed an organization he called the Italian American Civil Rights League and used it to rally support against the FBI’s claim that he was a mobster. With the league as his mouthpiece, Colombo maintained that there was no such thing as “the Mafia” and that he was “just an honest businessman.” The league was hugely successful and so powerful that Colombo was able to win concessions from the producers of The Godfather about the way Italian Americans were portrayed in the film.</em></p>
<p><em>The Profaci organization’s racketeering remained profitable too, but many of Colombo’s subordinates were bridling at the way he ran the business and divided the spoils. To his hardened street enforcers, Colombo was a lightweight and a publicity seeker. Dissension in his family was building.</em></p>
<p><em>Into this unsettled world, Joey arrived fresh from prison, bearing a ten year grudge against the Profaci family. Joey might have been flashing his new cleaned-up image in public, but in secret he was re-energising the Gallo gang. He planned to dispose Colombo. Less than six weeks after his release from prison, Joey demanded a $100,000 tribute payment from Colombo as a condition for staying away from his business. Colombo refused to pay. Instead, he placed a contract on Joey’s life.</em></p>
<p><em>On June 28th, 1971, just four months after Joey’s release from prison, Colombo held a rally of his Italian American Civil Rights League in Columbus Circle, just off Central Park. Thousands of people attended the noon time affair. But as Colombo began making his way to the dais to speak he was shot and severely wounded by a black man identified as Jerome Johnson.</em></p>
<p><em>No one ever discovered who Johnson was working for. As fate would have it, he was immediately shot and killed by yet another never-identified gunman. Colombo was left in a near-vegetative state and was off the board as far as the rackets were concerned. The event made the cover of Time magazine the following week.</em></p>
<p><em>Joey claimed that the FBI was behind the Colombo attack, but most reasonable minds concluded that Joey had engineered it himself. He had a clear motive, and he was certainly capable of pulling it off. While the police and FBI looked for clues, the heirs to Colombo’s power renewed the contract on Joey’s life…</em></p>
<p>Something that has not been widely investigated in the shooting of Colombo is the link between Charles Shephard shot dead by Joseph Fatty Russo just six months previously. Jerome Johnson and Shephard had both lived close to each other in the same area in northern New Jersey and may well have been connected by friendship or some other link. It’s quite possible that Johnson was driven by a desire to avenge his black brother and knew of the link between Russo and the Colombo family members and how they had helped him avoid prosecution for the double killings.</p>
<p>Joey had become friendly while in prison with Harlem dope dealer Nicky Barnes, and it was widely rumoured that through his prison connections into the black criminal fraternity he was intending to recruit black gangsters into his own organization. This never eventuated and may well have been simply street gossip, but the Mafia family under Colombo, seemed certain that Gallo was behind the shooting of their boss. He was a target for them from that day at Columbus Circle according to some crime researchers, although it was not that obvious to police observers who were tracking the activities of the Mafia underworld. They believed that having done his time in prison, the feeling was to leave him alone to get on with his life.</p>
<p>The Gallo gang themselves did their own research into the shooting of Colombo and decided the man behind Johnson was probably Tony Abbatermarco, son of the late Frankie Shots.</p>
<p>He was the biggest numbers guy in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a black ghetto in Brooklyn and tight with a lot of black criminals. He’d held a grudge against the Profaci family since the killing of his father, was mad at Joe Colombo for squeezing money from him and had hated Joey Gallo who he knew had been behind the hit on his father.</p>
<p>He had guessed, quite rightly that the shooting of Colombo would automatically be construed as an act by Joey Gallo.</p>
<p>Joey had left prison deeply disturbed by the way time had left him by. He was a train wreck in waiting, searching for a displaced point on the lines of his life. He was returning to streets that were very different from when he prowled them. Following the death of Joe Profaci and the installation of Joe Colombo as the family boss in 1963, there had been some changes in the family’s structure of command.</p>
<p>Joe Yack Yacovelli, Carmine Persico and Larry Gallo had been promoted to capo status. But Joey, languishing in his prison cell, stayed a soldier and this burned away at him like an ululating cancer.</p>
<p>On his release, he had demanded a cash testimonial from Colombo to guarantee the boss his fealty. He also wanted all his old rackets back-- the policy banks, the loan shark operations and vending machine companies-- and demanded that a least ten of his crew be made into the family.</p>
<p>On May 22nd he had tried again to kidnap the boss of the family, this time Joe Combo,<br /> But the attempt was botched, dissolving into no more than a street brawl. But the message was loud and clear. The Gallo-Profaci war was on again.</p>
<p>None of Joey’s demand were ever going to happen. The Colombo family at a meeting on December 20th 1971, officially rejected all of his demands.</p>
<p>Joe Yacovelli, who would become a major player in the administration of the Colombo crime family, wanted to kill him where he stood, but this was vetoed by the Commission, the Mafia’s board of arbitration. They did not want another Gallo war on their hands.</p>
<p>According to Donald Frankos, a Greek-American criminal who had served time in prison with Joey, Gallo owned several night clubs on 8th Avenue, and two or more sweatshops in the garment district. He also ran dice and card games and was into extortion rackets and trafficking cocaine and heroin, and through black criminal associates was running criminal enterprises in Gary, Indiana and Steubenville, Ohio.</p>
<p>Just three weeks before Joey’s final birthday party, he and two of his men had gone to the San Susan nightclub in Mineola, Long Island, threatened the manager and told him they were taking the place over. A place that just happened to have John Franzese as a silent partner. John Sonny Franzese was one of the more terrifying dangerous mob bosses in New York and had been part of the Profaci/Colombo crime family for most of his working life. A psychopath in his own right, a stone-killer, whose father Carmine The Lion had allegedly disposed of his victims in his bakery ovens. Franzese was not a man to trifle with.</p>
<p>Then on Easter week-end 1972, Ferrara’s Pastry Shop on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan, was broken into and it was reputed over $50000 was stolen from the safe. Ferrara’s was not just any old café, although it was old, dating back to 1892, it was also a venerable landmark and meeting place of many of the senior mob figures in New York, including Carlo Gambino, allegedly the biggest Mafia boss in America.</p>
<p>It was an egregious move, an insult to the old Don who would have given his guarantee to the owners that their place of business was safe and protected by the strength of his reputation. To compound matters, Ferrara’s was a place often used by Vincent Aloi, who may have taken over the management of the Colombo Mafia family after boss Joe was gunned down at Columbus Circle.</p>
<p>The word went around that Joey had given his approval to two of his men--Gennaro Ciprio and Richie Grossman--to do the job. Both men were subsequently murdered, Ciprio, who was Sonny Pinto’s godson, was blasted to death in a hail of bullets in front of his sister, as he left the restaurant he owned in Brooklyn, on 86th Street.</p>
<p>Five days after the break-in at Ferrara’s Joey Gallo was dead.</p>
<p>In the end, it didn’t matter what the trigger was--the shooting of Colombo, the muscle attempt on Long Island, the theft from a mob sanctuary, the disrespect he had shown the men of the Colombo Mafia family--he was a victim of the system, and the politics of cosa nostra.</p>
<p>In essence, since the day he left prison he was a dead man walking.</p>
<p>Joey had moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan on his release and rented Apartment 8A in a bland, twenty-one story apartment building at Seven West 14th Street, a block away from Union Square. Sina, the woman he was to marry, lived with her young daughter in a penthouse apartment in the same building, paying almost twice the rent that Joey did. When he queried this apparent show of wealth by a dental technician, one of his friends shrugged and mentioned something about the dentist she worked for.</p>
<p>After a classic whirlwind courtship, Joey and Sina married, and three weeks later they would celebrate his 43rd birthday.</p>
<p>On the evening of April 6th, Pete Diapolous, driving a black Cadillac, arrived at the apartment building with his gummare, Edith Russo, and along with Joey’s sister Carmella Fiorello, Sina, her ten-year old daughter Lisa, and Joey spruced up and sharp in a pinstripe suit, headed off for a night at the Copacabana at 10 East 60th Street, just across from Central Park. They arrived about eleven, in time for the second show which starred <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/insulting-mobsters-with-don-rickles">Don Rickles</a>.</p>
<p>Sometime after four the next morning, they left the club and drove south into Little Italy. Although they had wined and dined, Joey insisted they needed more sustenance, and he was determined to find a favourite Chinese restaurant, Su Lings, in Chinatown. When they arrived, it was closed. Trolling the rain-washed streets, they found themselves crawling up Mulberry. There, on the corner of Hester, they saw arches and square windows all lit up, a new place on the block, called Umberto’s Clam House.</p>
<p>It had been opened in February by Umberto Ianiello, the thirty-five year old brother of Matty The Horse Ianiello, a capo in the Genovese Mafia family. There was a group of men standing talking on the corner, including Matty, who was acting as the manager this night, as Diapolous pulled the Cadillac to halt. The windows wound down, and Pete and Joey chatted to the men, one of whom was Joe Luparelli.</p>
<p>Joe Pesh Luparelli had led a less than auspicious life as a gopher and associate for the Colombo and Genovese crime families in the years since the killing of Mickey Evans. Using a luncheonette on 11th Avenue between 60th and 61st Street as a business base, he worked under Dick Fusco and Joe Gentile and was at one time a drive for Joe Yacovelli, a job he had been instructed to do by Sonny Pinto. Up to this point his mob career had revolved around the Westside, the term by which the underworld referred to the Genovese Mafia family. He’d been in prison on two occasions, and made his money by being a safe man, strong-arm goon, fence, loan shark and in the numbers business.</p>
<p>Encouraged by their comments, Joey Gallo decided they would eat here, and as Pete parked the car, the small party moved into the restaurant.</p>
<p>Fishing nets and plastic life preservers bedecked the walls, and the floor was tiled white. The tables scattered around were butcher-block design and there was a serving counter-type bar at the back of the seating area, running the length of the restaurant from the Hester Street end to near the kitchen.</p>
<p>There are conflicting accounts as to whether or not there were other customers in the place. Some sources say it was empty, others that four men in work clothes were sitting around a table; that there was an Asian couple in the corner, two college-type girls sitting together and a few night people scatted about at tables and at the bar.</p>
<p>There are only two recorded eyewitness accounts of the events which happened in the early hours of that morning, April 7th: the one reported by Joe Luparelli who was outside, and by Pete Diapolous who was inside. Sinna Essary, almost forty years later, did pass on her very brief recollection of the shooting, but it was blurred by time and no doubt distorted by the sclerotic panic she found herself in.</p>
<p>Luparelli recounted his involvement approximately two weeks after the shooting went down, and Diapolous his presence at the killing of Joey Gallo in a book he co-authored about four years later, so their memories would have been fresh and their recollections much clearer.</p>
<p>The Gallo party ordered and enjoyed a fish and pasta meal and were so impressed, they ordered up seconds. In the meantime, Luparelli had left Umberto’s and hurried down Mulberry, crossing over Grand and into the King Wah Chinese restaurant at number ninety-one. Although closed to the public this time in the morning, it was open to the mob. It had in fact at one time been a Mafia social club and was currently owned by Dominick Dickie Pallatto who ran it with his Chinese wife, Mona. Pallato would be found dead in mysterious circumstances in 1977--drowned in three feet of water in his swimming pool on the island of Grenada. It was deemed he had drowned due to cramp!</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237019466,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237019466,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237019466?profile=original" width="223" /></a>Sitting at the bar were Sonny Pinto and a soldier in the Colombo crime family called Philip <em>Fat Funghi</em> Gambino (right), a distant cousin of the don, Carlo Gambino. Luparelli told them that Joey Gallo was eating up at Umberto’s and Sonny decided this was the time to hit him. There were also two other men who were brothers, at the bar. Luparelli only ever knew them as Cisco and Benny. Sonny went to a telephone in the restaurant and rang Joe Yacovelli, who gave his immediate approval to clip Joey. The brothers went out to fit-up and returned with two .38 and one.32 calibre revolvers.</p>
<p>Because Luparelli was walking with the aid of a cane as he had damaged his knee some weeks earlier, his job would be to drive one of the two cars the hit squad would use. As Fat Funghi was on parole, he would drive the other. Sonny, Benny and Cisco would go into Umberto’s.</p>
<p>The two cars headed north up the narrow, one-way street and sometime after 5:00 AM parked either side of Hester Street. Armed up, the three gunmen went into the restaurant.</p>
<p>Over the years the story of the killing of Joey Gallo has been retold endless times. . The stories say he died on Mulberry Street when in fact he was actually declared dead in the Beekman Hospital after he was driven there by police officer Felix Agosta who stopped his patrol car outside Umberto‘s just after the shooting.</p>
<p>That everyone under the sun did the hit, the latest disclosure being that of Frank Sheeran, a mid-west killer who claimed on his death-bed that he went into Umberto’s and did the shooting. Frank must have been the only three-handed man on the planet because the New York Police Engineering Unit carried out an evidence survey of the crime scene and found the remains of at least twelve shots that had been fired--three .32 calibre, five .38 calibre from two different guns, three of unidentified calibre and one .25 calibre and this did not include the three that actually connected with their target. A total of fifteen rounds fired in all.</p>
<p>The other factor that makes his involvement in the shooting impalpable is just how did he know where to go to do the job? The Gallo party themselves had no idea where they were heading when they left the Copacabana. The hit on Joey was the result of coincidence or fate or simply sheer bad luck. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was a Titanic looking for the iceberg in the dark, inhospitable sea of the mean streets of Manhattan.</p>
<p>Henry Miller said <em>We create our fate every day we live</em>. If he was right, Joey Gallo was going in the wrong direction from the day he was born.</p>
<p>On December 13th, 1972, a Manhattan Grand Jury identified one Carmine DiBiase in an indictment handed up on the killing of Joey Gallo. There was no mention made of one Frank Sheeran.</p>
<p>Pete Diapolous, a man who had spent most of his working life on the streets of New York, states categorically in his book The Sixth Family;</p>
<p><em>I saw Sonny Pinto wide and dark coming in……I made Sonny Pinto and two other guys.</em></p>
<p>Diapolous had met Sheeran a few hours earlier at the Copacabana so knew exactly what he looked like. There was no way Pete the Greek would have mistaken Sheeran for Carmine DiBiase.</p>
<p>Insert here image of Pete Diapolous</p>
<p>Joey and his group had been enjoying their food (no drink as Umberto’s was so new it was not yet licensed) when, to coin the hackneyed expression enjoyed by writers of thrillers, <em>All Hell broke loose</em>. At approximately 5:10 AM Pinto and his crew burst into the restaurant guns blazing, slugs going all over the place. Pushing over tables to protect the women, Joey then ran away from their area, drawing the fire of the gunmen who pinged away as he raced towards the corner door at Mulberry and Hester. Diapolous, struggling to clear his .25 Titan semi-automatic, took a round in his backside as he tumbled over the tables.</p>
<p>Chasing the gunmen out of the restaurant he fired repeatedly at their cars as they drove off.</p>
<p>Joey Gallo shot in the elbow, the buttocks and the back collapsed onto the sidewalk, and lay motionless until Pete Diapolous and the police officer bundled him into the patrol car and screamed off to the hospital a five minute journey to the south.</p>
<p>And that was that. With his death, the Gallo war drew to a close.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237019694,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237019694,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237019694?profile=original" width="622" /></a>There was one final incident which in a tragic way epitomized The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight reputation that the Gallo gang had acquired over the years..</p>
<p>The Neapolitan Noodle was a restaurant located at 320 East 79th Street in Manhattan. In August 1972, it was the scene of one of the worst mistakes in Cosa Nostra history. Albert Gallo was determined to avenge his brother Joey’s death and laid down a hit to be carried out on some of the Colombo family’s top administration.</p>
<p>On Friday, August 11th, the Gallos found out that Yacovelli, Allie Persico, brother of Carmine, Jerry Langella and Charlie Panarella would be at the bar of the Neapolitan Noodle. Robert Bongiovi aka Bobby Darrow a long time member of the Gallo gang was earmarked to spot the targets for the killers. A few minutes before their hit man arrived however, the mobsters had moved to a different table. In their place were five meat traders with their wives celebrating the engagement of one of their daughters to the restaurant’s manager. As the party moved to their table, the shooter, dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt and wearing dark glasses and a long, black wig, opened up with two guns, firing nine shots, killing Sheldon Epstein and Max Teklech and wounding two of the other men. The killer, allegedly brought into New York from Las Vegas, escaped and was never found.</p>
<p>No one was ever prosecuted for the killing of Joey Gallo which Pete Hamill referred to as <em>A classic New York moment full of tradition, an endorsement of certain eternal verities, one that brought immense joy to the life of newspaper editors.</em></p>
<p>The only one who did time was Pete the Greek. He got a year in Rikers for illegal possession of an empty firearm.</p>
<p>Joey was buried in a half-ton $5000 casket in Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, in Lot 40314 alongside his brother, Larry who had died of cancer in 1968. He shares the cemetery space with luminaries such as Boss Tweed, Leonard Bernstein, Lola Montez, William S. Hart and George Catlin, a lawyer who changed professions and became a painter of the Indians in the wilderness of America. He had died only a hundred years before Joey, although in terms of the way America had changed, it could well have been a million.</p>
<p>His funeral was a circus, with hundreds of people crowding the sidewalks to try and catch a glimpse of the coffin, and police and FBI agents mingling with the crowds to prevent any potential acts of gangland retribution that might erupt.</p>
<p>Sina Essary remembered the procession would have appealed to Joey’s sense of show business. Tommy Udo was dead, and as she remarked, “<em>You would have thought the Pope was passing by</em>.”</p>
<p>As a former nun, she would have known better than most.</p>
<p>Joey Gallo was a complex, confounding figure whose brief life seemed to have been overshadowed by an almost pathological desire to prove to everyone how much smarter he was than they. As Charles McCarry commented, he <em>“saw things with the joyful clarity of the incurably insane.”</em> It’s easy to picture him pleading with Sina not to rob him of the credit for destroying himself.</p>
<p>Like Othello, he would play the swan and die in music.</p>
<p>Three weeks before he was shot dead in a restaurant, The Godfather, believed to be the seminal Mafia movie of all time, previewed in New York. It featured a scene of a Mafia man being shot dead in a restaurant. The coincidence no doubt helped cement fable and reality in the public‘s consciousness. Maybe Mafia gunmen as well.</p>
<p>Following the shooting at Umberto’s, Joe Luparelli, Carmine DiBiase, the two brothers and Philip Gambino went back to the Chinese restaurant down the street and had a few more drinks. Benny and Cisco eventually left to dispose of the guns, then Joe, Carmine and Gambino travelled out of New York and stayed for a number of days at an apartment provided for them by Joe Yacovelli in Nyack twenty miles north of the Manhattan boundary.</p>
<p>In due course, Luparelli afraid for his life, fearing that Yackovelli was going to have him killed to silence him as a witness, fled New York and travelled to Los Angeles. He subsequently surrendered to the government and became an informant.</p>
<p>Philip Gambino disappeared from New York and was arrested by authorities near his home in Palm Beach, Florida, in May 1972, and charged with violation of his parole condition by consorting with known felons.</p>
<p>Benny and Cisco, whoever they were, merged back into the crepuscular landscape that hid them as though they had never existed.</p>
<p>Joe Yacovelli also went on the lam, and eventually, on February 27th, 1974, accompanied by his lawyer, David Markowitz, surrendered to the police in a radio station in New York. He was charged as a material witness in the killing of Joey Gallo.</p>
<p>On April 9th, two days after the murder of Joey Gallo, Carmine DiBiase met up with a man called Charlie in a lot in Engelwood Cliffs, New Jersey and left with him by car, heading somewhere.</p>
<p>And so, Carmine DiBiase (right) disappeared from New York, again.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237020671,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237020671,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237020671?profile=original" width="232" /></a>It would be the last time that he and the police or the Federal Bureau of Investigation would cross paths. Sonny fought the law, and the law won, insofar as his actions that night on the corner of Mulberry and Hester sent him straight past go and back into oblivion. Away from his beloved streets where the action was. Away from the excitement and lure of the clubs, and the broads and the endless scamming and deal-doing that had filled his days.</p>
<p>Joe Luparelli claims that Carmine did however come back to New York one last time, in the summer of 1975.</p>
<p>On June 30th, there was an altercation on the corner of Prince and Elizabeth Streets in Little Italy. A card sharp had set up a Monte game and suckered in three passing men who lost a considerable amount of money before they realized they were being fleeced. One of these men was Gaetano, the 26-year-old son of Carmine DiBiase.<br /> When they remonstrated with the dealer he ran off, jumped into a car and sped off. Gaetano and another man chased him in their car, stopping the dealer’s car a block away on the corner of Houston Street.</p>
<p>Gaetano DiBiase, dressed in a white suit, pulled his car over and ran up to the dealer, pointing a gun and shouting:</p>
<p><em>“Give me the money.”</em></p>
<p>An off-duty police officer at a gas station across the street saw what was going down and ran over, drawing his handgun. He shouted at Gaetano that he was a police officer, and then a fire-fight erupted. The police officer shot DiBiase twice, who staggered over to his car, which then drove off at high speed. The car travelled as far as 11th Street and 7th Avenue in Greenwich Village, stopping in front of St. Vincent’s Hospital. Gaetano rolled out of his car and collapsed on the sidewalk. The car disappeared. Rushed into emergency, surgeons operated but were unable to save him. He died three days later.</p>
<p>The police staked out the wake and the funeral hoping to apprehend Carmine DiBiase, but he never showed up. At least during the day. Luparelli claimed Sonny Pinto visited the funeral parlour late one night to pay his last respects to his son. It was also alleged that he put out a contract on the officer who had shot his son. Senior officials of the New York Police Department visited the heads of each of the five families and promised a massive retaliation against the mob if anyone tried to fill it. The contract was eventually withdrawn.</p>
<p>Carmine DiBiase was in the wind again. His life deracinated by actions he embraced with almost a libidinal enthusiasm, was corkscrewing him away once more from<br /> his home and family and the life he knew.</p>
<p>It was rumoured he had moved to Hartford, the state capital, a small, relatively nondescript city in the bucolic reaches of Connecticut, nicknamed The Insurance Capital of the World.</p>
<p>And here, is where the trail runs cold.</p>
<p><em>If this is</em> where he landed, his final years are not unlike the man himself: an enigma, maybe wrapped in a riddle and even possibly shrouded by mystery, to paraphrase Winston Churchill.</p>
<p>Did he start again? Form new relationships? Get married, albeit bigamously? Heaven forbid, get a job? He obviously kept deeply under the radar, as his name never crops up again in any police report or judicial system north, south or west of New York.</p>
<p>It was as though he had simply vanished off the face of the earth.</p>
<p>Maybe in the twilight of his life he would wander down to the south side, the Little Italy of Hartford, where he could find the food and drinks that perhaps reminded him of the Lower Manhattan version of the mythical neighbourhood, the place the amici nostra would gather on street corners to talk and smoke and reflect on their day’s endeavours. As Stefan Kanfer recalled it “<em>with its gritty avenues and rude wit, its hard-nosed gin joints and occasional grace notes.</em>”</p>
<p>The teeming, crowded alleys and tenements where the Mafia had begun sometime towards the end of the nineteenth century. The Mustache Petes of the old Honoured Society - Giuseppe Morello and Giouse Galluci and Ignazio Lupo and Joe Fontana and even for a brief period, none other than Vito Cascioferro, the big boss from Sicily - had all played their part in putting down roots and helped grow the biggest most far-reaching criminal conspiracy America would ever experience.</p>
<p>And he had been part of it.</p>
<p>One of the thousands of unknown mobsters who had made up this criminal enterprise. A phenomenon born of the hopes and aspirations of the poor, uneducated working stiffs born out of the years of Italian Diaspora into the biggest city in America. Men whose lack of education, and cultural background, branded them as misfits in the brave new world and whose only chance for survival and progress was under the umbrella of a secret society that held the city and country to ransom for generations.</p>
<p>Perhaps as he sat drinking a coffee, watching the world go by, he remembered images of his life; a montage of memories filled with Grand Street, and the Mayfair Boys and card games and fenced jewellery and shylock loans and deeds done darkly for the boss man and most of all, a bleak, wet early morning in April, the arches and square windows of Umberto’s reflecting the cold yellow light, shaking to the echo of gunfire, people shouting and screaming as he like some Jedi Knight, brought order back onto the streets in a wild and lawless city in a universe far, far away.</p>
<p><em>And, of course, that is what all of this is - all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on, senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill-writ, ill-rhymed and fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs - that song, endlessly reincarnated - born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan, or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it. That nameless black-hulled ship of Ulysses, that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train, that Rocket '88', that Buick 6 - same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness.</em></p>
<p>- Nick Tosches: Where Dead Voices Gather</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><em>I would like to thank Jim Ruffalo for passing on information I had missed in my research.</em></span></p>
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Joe Barboza: Boston Barbarian
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/joe-barboza-boston-barbarian
2012-01-11T12:00:00.000Z
2012-01-11T12:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/joe-barboza-boston-barbarian"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237001674,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237001674?profile=original" width="500" /></a>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>The alliteration is perhaps inexcusable. The description however, is almost as perfect as you will get.</p>
<p>A man who allegedly bit off part of another man’s ear in a bar brawl. Who terrified a family as he tried to destroy their car- with them in it. Someone who apparently actually frightened some members of the Boston police department to the point that they would walk away rather than confront him. So feared by the city’s newspaper photographers they would often attach a note to the back of their shots of him: NO CREDIT ON PHOTOGRAPHS. A hit-man who quite possibly murdered at least twenty men or more. This was according to the testimony of his lawyer, given at a Congressional Hearing in 2001.</p>
<p>And deeply and darkly hinted, a man who once chewed on a piece of skull from one of his victims, Carlton Eaton, shot dead by Joe in September, 1964.</p>
<p>Edmund H. Maloney writing about Barboza in the <em>Hartford Courant</em>, claimed that Barboza had a thing about chewing. Maybe it stemmed from his oddly shaped incisors that curved like fangs, rather than teeth.</p>
<p>In his relatively short life as a criminal on the streets of Boston, Joe Barboza created a reputation for violence and uncontrolled brutality that is hard to match anywhere in the records of American organized crime.</p>
<p>Attorney Victor Garo said about him:</p>
<p><em>He was a loan shark, a receiver of stolen goods, a leg-breaker. He’d shoot you in the head, puncture your ear-drum with an ice-pick or dismember you with a knife.</em></p>
<p>His own lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, called him:</p>
<p><em>One of the worst men on the face of the earth.</em></p>
<p>A memorandum from the Special Agent in Charge of the Boston Office of the F.B.I. John J. Kehoe Junior to J. Edgar Hoover, referred to Barboza as:</p>
<p><em>A professional assassin, responsible for numerous homicides and acknowledged by all professional law enforcement representatives in the Boston area to be the most dangerous individual known.</em></p>
<p>On one occasion when he was planning to kill a target, he decided to set up an ambush at the victim’s home. His plan was to set fire to the building and when the man fled, he would be shot down. When someone pointed out the man’s mother lived there and could die also, this apparently caused no concern to Barboza, who stated it was not his fault that the mother would be present, and he would not care whether the mother died or not.</p>
<p>He stood about five eight or five ten according to which records are consulted, and looked almost like a cartoon impression of a Neanderthal Man with enormous shoulders and upper body, balanced on undersized legs. His upper and lower halves did not balance, and linked into his block of a head and huge, jutting jaw he came across as some kind of cave-man lost in a time warp. Someone once said of him:</p>
<p><em>He walked like a Silverback Gorilla</em></p>
<p>Sensible people would avoid him, and even those close to him never knew what might trigger his fierce and at times uncontrollable temper. Joe came across as a wild, unhinged hot-rod, burning on all four tyres, revving in overdrive on all shifts. He went through his maleficent life like a hound dog searching for its prey. An insatiable appetite for violence fuelled by an egregious temperament made him a textbook example of an anti-social misfit layered with evil and dangerous tendencies. He once murdered a man a week after he had attended Joe’s wedding.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237002060,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237002060,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237002060?profile=original" width="254" /></a>Vincent Teresa writes in his book, <em>Vinnie Teresa’s Mafia</em>, the following regarding Barboza:</p>
<p><em>Take Joe Barboza (right). He was one of the toughest enforcers around in New England before he became a federal informer. He had a reputation on the street of being a violent, violent guy with a terrible temper. The cops were afraid of him, street people were scared of him, even me - as close as I was to the guy, I’d never so much as cross a bridge alone with him in a car. You never knew what would set the guy off.</em></p>
<p><em>There was one incident I remember in particular involving Joe. This happened on Bennington Street in East Boston. It was about one in the afternoon, and I was standing on the corner. Barboza was in a car with Guy Frizzi, a street guy that Joe was close with at the time. They were driving along Bennington Street when some poor guy with his wife and two little kids cut Barboza off by accident. Joe went wild. He started chasing this guy, blowing the horn and yelling out the window: ‘You mother . . . you son-of-a-bitch . . . I’ll get you.’</em></p>
<p><em>Finally, Joe caught up with the guy and cut him off. The driver was smart enough to lock all his windows and doors. Barboza and Frizzi pounded on the windows and then jumped up on the hood of this guy’s car, smashing at the windshield. At the same time, Barboza was yelling nasty things he planned to do to the guy’s wife. I remember seeing the poor little kids, crying their eyes out, hanging on to their father while their mother is screaming her head off. Now, while all this was happening, there was a cop standing on a nearby corner, just watching. Finally, the cop turned away and walked down the street. He was scared to death of Barboza himself. Joe wasn’t through though. He ran back to his car and got out a baseball bat and started pounding on the car. He smashed the fenders, the windows, everything. He almost destroyed the car before some cops finally came over and tried to calm Joe down. While they were trying to cool Joe, they told this poor driver who’s sitting there in his smashed-up car to get the hell out of the area fast and forget about the damage. I was standing there all the time watching it, laughing my head off. At the time it was funny. Now I think back and it ain’t so funny. The driver would have been killed if Joe had got his hands on him, and all because he accidentally cut Joe off in traffic.</em></p>
<p>And again, further testimony, still from Teresa:</p>
<p><em>…..That’s why he was so dangerous. He was unpredictable. When he tasted blood, everyone in his way got it. Barboza went into the club [searching for a member of the McLaughlin mob named Ray DiStasio] and caught DiStasio cold. The trouble was, a poor slob named John B.O’Neil, who had a bunch of kids, walked in to get a pack of cigarettes. Barboza killed them both because he didn’t want any witnesses. DiStasio got two in the back of the head and O’Neil got three. It was a shame. I mean, this O’Neil was a family man—he had nothing to do with the mob. Barboza should have waited. That’s why he was so dangerous. He was unpredictable.</em></p>
<p>There were however, some people who Joe didn’t scare. There's the time in 1965 when Joseph Elmer McCain, one of the toughest cops ever in Boston, arrested Joe Barboza, for beating up a patron at <em>The Ebb Tide</em> bar in Revere Beach. In the jail, Barboza insulted McCain, saying he wasn't so tough without his gun. On the spot, the cop unbuckled his gun and nightstick, stepped in the cell, and invited Barboza to <em>take a shot</em>. He declined, and McCain said, <em>I thought so.</em></p>
<p>Although he had dreams of joining the New England Mafia, known by its members outside of Boston as the Office, and within the city as <em>In Town</em>, behind his back, these people referred to Barboza as <em>the nigger</em> because of his dark skin. As neither of his parents were of Italian descent, membership into the mob was never on the cards for Joe.</p>
<p>Like so many criminals, Barboza was downright ugly. The word ugly is Middle-English in origin, deriving from a Norse word meaning unpleasant or repulsive. It can also mean threatening or dangerous, adjectives that aptly describe so many of the people who populated the American underworld.</p>
<p>Joe Barboza was definitely one such man.</p>
<p>A killer for hire and a thug by nature and inclination, there seems at first glance, little about Barboza that justifies his importance in the history of the criminal underworld of America. Many of its members were ugly; many were mean and vicious and deadly killers. But Joe was different and for three reasons:</p>
<p>He was the first person ever to enter <em>The Witness Protection Program</em>. It was actually set up and created to protect him and manage his safety and that of his family.</p>
<p>He was one of only two East Coast mob-connected criminals to ever escape the wrath of a Mafia crime overlord, eloping to California to secure safety and freedom, to be then tracked down and murdered thousands of miles from his hometown. Peter Poulus is often fitted into this category, but his murder by Stevie Flemmi in Nevada was not Mob ordained.</p>
<p>However, Joe’s real claim to fame as a malcontent swimming around the edges of organized crime in Boston was to be the man who cost the United States Government over $100 million dollars as a result of his illegal actions which sent four innocent men into prison on life sentences. When he was ultimately exposed, it resulted in the uncovering of one of the most scandalous examples of corrupt behaviour that has ever occurred within the Federal Bureau of Investigation.</p>
<p>Joe Barboza was born of Portuguese immigrants, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on September 20th 1932. He grew up a lawless child and in 1945, at the age of thirteen, he and his brother were arrested for vandalising streetcar signs in the town. By the time he was seventeen, he was leading a pack of young thugs who became known as The Cream Puff Bandits, when after robbing a restaurant they pelted each other with pastries across the dining room.</p>
<p>He went to prison for the first time in December, 1949. Three years later, at the age of twenty, he led a prison break-out from the Concorde Reformatory of himself and six other inmates, the biggest in the prison’s seventy-five year history. Re-captured within twenty-four hours at an East Boston subway station, he was given an additional sentence, to be served this time, at the maximum security facility in Walpole.<br /> He was paroled from here in 1958.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237001890,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237001890,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237001890?profile=original" width="208" /></a>It was in Walpole, one of the toughest prisons in Massachusetts, that Joe Barboza’s (right) criminal career would take a quantum shift. There have been suggestions that he met up with prisoners who were either Mafiosi or certainly associates of the New England mob, and through this link, he became known to Raymond Loreda Salvatore Patriarca, the boss of the New England mafia.</p>
<p>Patriarca had put in a long apprenticeship during the Prohibition period, getting his first criminal conviction at the age of seventeen, and three more times before he was twenty. This would be followed by numerous other arrests on charges ranging from white slavery to breaking and entering and armed robbery.</p>
<p>During his lifetime Patriarca was arrested or indicted 28 times, convicted seven times, imprisoned four times, and served 11 years in prison.</p>
<p>He masterminded a jailbreak in which a prison guard and a trustee were killed and in between learning the ways of the mob, first as an associate then a member of a New York Mafia crime family which he allegedly joined in 1929, although this has never been substantiated, spent ten years in prison. It was more than likely that his career in the Mafia began in the crime family of Frank Iaconi, the head of the Worcester clan.</p>
<p>Raymond Patriarca allegedly worked as muscle on rum-running launches operated by Iacone during the Prohibition period. Virgil W. Peterson the famous lawmaker, confirmed this at the Kefauver Committee Hearings that ran from 1950-1951. Because of Iacone’s manipulation of the political and police machinery that ran Worcester, it was a strong part of the triangle-Boston/Rhode Island/Worcester-that controlled organized crime in the state of Massachusetts. Patriarca had been born in Worcester and always had a soft spot for the city. He and his family had moved to Providence, Rhode island, when he was three. His father, Eleuterio, had been offered a good job there as a manager of a packing store and they lived in a house on Atwells Avenue, in the Federal Hill neighbourhood, just across from the building where Raymond would make his business headquarters in the years ahead. Eleuterio at some stage opened a bar on the Avenue and his wife found work as a nurse.</p>
<p>Patriarca lived in Worcester during 1920s and 1930s and maintained his ties with friends and business associates there. He was the senior man attending at the Little Apalachin conclave held at the former Bancroft Hotel there, in 1959. By 1956, Iaconi was dead of natural causes, and Patriarca had assumed control of the New England Mafia.</p>
<p>He was pure Mafia-through and through.</p>
<p>In an illegal wiretap of his office in 1966 he was heard reminiscing:</p>
<p><em>In this thing of our, your love of your mother and father is one thing, your love for the Family is a different kind of love.</em></p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237002673,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237002673,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237002673?profile=original" width="350" /></a>Patriarca (right), referred to by his peers and mob associates as The Man, or George, and who lived in a modest white, clapboard house on the corner of Lancaster Street in Providence, had taken over the mob of Boston based Philip Buccolo when he himself relinquished his position as the boss and retreated to his birthplace-Sicily-in 1954. There, he developed a successful poultry business on a five acre site next to his luxurious home on Piazza Marie Consolatrice, in Palermo city, where he lived until he died aged 101, in 1987.</p>
<p>With his departure, the power base of the New England Mafia shifted south to where Patriarca would run his business from the Mafia sewer that was Providence, Rhode Island.</p>
<p>A vicious, brutal man himself, who was overheard on a law enforcement wiretap saying the happiest days of his life were when he was on the street clipping people, he was once described by a Massachusetts State police officer as <em>just the toughest guy you ever saw.</em></p>
<p>Raymond Patriarca perhaps recognized the potential in Barboza. He would be useful for the mob’s street activities-enforcing loan payments, protecting shylocks, intimidating potential extortion targets, collecting on gambling debts-the staples of mob activity, the grease that kept the cogs from slipping, and which helped feed and fuel the major activities, union control, political manipulation, drug trafficking, distribution and management of illegal poker machines and control of prostitution rings. So much crime, so little time.</p>
<p>Once Patriarca established himself as the Czar of organized crime in the region, he handed over control and management of the Boston area to Gennaro Angiulo. This sub-division of territorial rights would operate in the years to come not so much as a satellite, but more a stand-alone unit, coughing up a monthly tribute to Providence. Angiulo on his return from military service in 1945, had quickly established himself in the tough, Italian enclave of Boston called ‘The North End.’ and by the late 1950s had struck the deal with Patriarca for the right to run Boston. According to Barboza, at any one time, Angiulo had over a million dollars out on the streets in shy lock money. And this was only one of his income earners.</p>
<p>Patriarca ran his criminal empire from a ram-shackled building at 168 Atwells Avenue on the corner of Dean Street, in Federal Hill, which housed the <em>National Cigarette Service Company</em> and <em>Coin-O-Matic Distributors</em>, a vending machine and pinball business. The business officially opened in 1956. In his dingy office he had an old leather couch and a black and white television set. There were there thirty years later when he died. His brother Joseph, worked alongside Raymond, and would be his surrogate when he went to prison in the late 1960s. This district within the city of Providence has always attracted a large Italian migrant population, and even to-day, 20% of the city’s ancestry connection is still from Italy. From here, he and Agiulo, (who according to O’Neil and Lehr in their book The Underboss, Patriarca had quickly seen as the pepper pot needed to shake Boston out its backwater doldrums,) would for the next thirty years like <em>The Odd Couple</em>, control organized crime in the state.</p>
<p>Patriarca had strong ties to the New York Genovese Mafia crime family who had a foothold in Connecticut, was allegedly a partner in illegal gambling operations in Philadephia with their mob boss, Angelo Bruno, and apparently had a hidden interest in the famous Berkshire Downs race track, one of whose owners was Frank Sinatra.</p>
<p>It is not entirely clear who Barboza reported to in the New England Mafia, although Vincent Fat Vinny Teresa, the Mafia associate, swindler thief and gambler, often called The New England Joe Valachi for the information he disclosed about the Mafia, claimed Joe Barboza was retained by Patriarca on a fee of $900 a week, to be on call to carry out killings when required.</p>
<p>Joe Barboza was also available for hire to another group of thugs and killers in New England: the non-Italian underworld.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003085,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003085,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237003085?profile=original" width="203" /></a>Before the Italians dominated the crime scene in Beantown, there were the Boston Irish gangs. Criminal mobs developed over the years across South Boston, Charlestown, Somerville, Dorchester and Roxbury, many of them working for the Gustin Gang (named after a street in South Boston) under Frank Wallace (right), until he was gunned down on the streets of North End by Italian gangsters. He and Bernard Doddy Walsh were invited to a sit-down with Joe Lombardi and Philip Bucculo at the C and F Importing Company on Hanover Street, (some sources refer to this as CK Importing) on December 22nd and were shot dead as they entered the premises and made their way upstairs to the office. It was the last time an Irishman was to run the rackets in Boston until the early 1960s.</p>
<p>By then, many of these criminals had coalesced into two main groups, one that included James Buddy McLean which became known in 1972 as The Winter Hill Gang, based in Somervile, and the other headed up by George McLaughlin working from its territory to the east, in Charlestown.</p>
<p>Up until the time a drunken day out at a beach party went wrong, the McLeans and McLaughlins were the best of friends. Peat from the same bog, as the Irish say.</p>
<p>On Labour Day 1961, at a picnic near the New Hampshire border, McLaughlin, blind- drunk and belligerent, made a pass at a girlfriend of Andy Petricone, a close friend of McLean’s. (Petricone subsequently left Boston, moved to California, changed his name to Alex Rocco and became a movie star. Best known for the part he played of Moe Green in the Godfather.)</p>
<p>The two men gave McLaughlin a good beating that hospitalized him for two weeks. George’s brother Bernie, who headed the Charlestown gang demanded an apology which was refused by Buddy Mclean.</p>
<p>On October 29th, McLean, late in the evening, noticed three men hanging around his car parked in the street. They scattered as he went after them, shooting off his .38 revolver. Checking the car, he found it had been wired with three sticks of dynamite.</p>
<p>Within a few days, Bernie McLaughlin was dead. Reports give different days and different places of his killing; shot at close range with a .45 semi he was just as dead. Allegedly, the shooter was McLean, although he was never indicted for the murder. Effective that day, the infamous McLaughlin-McLean War began. It went on for years, before winding down towards the end of 1967.</p>
<p>Under the washed-out and faded blue sky of eastern Massachusetts, light reflecting off the dingy gunmetal greys of the roads and the rusted reds of the bricked buildings of Boston, the dead piled up. The back alleys, car parks and wastelands of Somerville and Charlestown became the killing fields in what might have been perhaps the bloodiest gang war in American criminal history. Perhaps as many as fifty men or more would die before the killings stopped.</p>
<p>Supporting McLean were a group of hard-case killers including Stephen Flemmi and his brother, Vincent, and Joe Barboza, who was undoubtedly responsible for a lot of the war’s casualties. Teresa claimed that Joe Barboza handled more hits than any one guy during the war.</p>
<p>Barboza told author Hank Messic who ghost-wrote his 1975 biography, Barboza, that he had murdered seven men, although he also allegedly bragged to his friends that the tally was closer to thirty.</p>
<p>Most of the victims of the war were shot dead. One was beheaded. Another dismembered. One was drowned. Four were beaten to death. One of the victims, John O’Neil was simply an innocent bystander at a christening party. No one really knows for sure just how many bodies fell. Somewhere between forty and fifty is believed to be a reasonable estimate.</p>
<p>To the media and any interested observer, the Boston underworld in the 1960s was a cesspit of warring factions-Irish-American, Italian-American and just plain old Americans fighting each other and among each other to grasp a share of whatever legal and illegal opportunity presented itself</p>
<p>Joe Barboza was not just killing people however. He had a business to run. He and his crew of street thugs would congregate at JB’s Bar on the corner of Bennington and Brook Streets in East Boston to work out their daily doses of criminal intent. They used it so much, it eventually became better known as simply <em>Barboza’s Corner</em>. His crew consisted of:</p>
<p>Joe Amico<br /> Patrick Fabiano<br /> James Kearns<br /> Arthur Bratsos<br /> Thomas De Prisco<br /> Joe and Ronald Dermondy-father and son.<br /> Carlton Eaton <br /> Edwrad Goss<br /> Nicholas Femia</p>
<p>All of them would ultimately be murdered.</p>
<p>Henry Skinny Man Tameleo from Cranston, Rhode Island, was a senior figure in the Patriarca crime family. Some sources claim he was the under boss, others that he carried the position of consigliere, or advisor. Either way, he was a senior part of the family’s administration.</p>
<p>He ran his operation in the Boston area from a club in Revere Beach. Five miles north of Boston city, it is the site of America’s first ever public beach, established in 1896. In the 1960s it was also the home to clubs and bars that were often frequented by Boston’s mob. <em>The Ebb Tide Lounge</em> on the Beach Boulevard, belonged to Richard Castucci, a member of the Winter Hill Gang. It turned into such a bucket of blood, the name was changed to <em>The Beach Ball</em> in the late 1960s. Joe Barboza was a frequent visitor here as he was to the old, three-story Victorian <em>Pleasanton Hotel</em>, further south down the road.</p>
<p>Legend has it that Barboza’s nickname <em>The Animal</em> was given him by Henry Tameleo. One afternoon drinking in the bar at the <em>Ebb Tide</em>, some old Italian guy started to remonstrate with Joe about something, and he responded by hitting the man. Tameleo interceded. Barboza as an ex-boxer, was accredited with hands as <em>dangerous weapons</em>.</p>
<p><em>I don’t want you to touch anybody with your hands again</em>, Tameleo shouted, Barboza sat brooding at the bar and then, suddenly leaned over and bit off part of the old man’s ear.</p>
<p><em>See</em>, he shouted back, <em>I didn’t touch him with my hands.</em></p>
<p>Sometime in 1963, according to Teresa, Tameleo hired Joe and his crew on a monthly retainer organizing a protection racket on clubs and bars in the Boston area. Barboza and his men would go into the places, start a fight and create havoc. Henry would then approach the owners, offering them protection. Apparently, it never failed to work. Joe had learned his apprenticeship in the protection racket business working for Edward Fishbein, an infamous Jewish loan shark, working-out of his office in Batterymarch Street, in Boston’s Wharf District.</p>
<p>So, through the late 1950s and early 1960s Joe had his hands full-stealing, scamming, extorting, cruising the city of Boston like a great white shark, breaking legs-and of course, killing people. He had also found the time to marry a Jewish woman, Philomena Termini in July 1958, on his release from Walpole, divorced her, re-married a woman called Claire and fathered a son by one wife and a daughter and a son by the second. He bought himself a new house in a well-to-do Jewish neighbourhood in Swampscott, a small town in Essex county, about fifteen miles north of Boston, and for a period between 1964 and 1966 he worked at legitimate jobs as a salesman and clerk at the Shawmut Insurance Company in Boston and moonlighted as a payroll clerk at $100 a week for the <em>Blue Bunny</em> and <em>Duffy’s Lounges</em>. By the end of 1968, he saw his second wife drift away.</p>
<p>By this time he was living under the care of the U.S. Marshals, as a protected witness, giving testimony against the New England Mafia. The program to secure his safety was set in place under the control of marshal John Partington. Barboza was at first held on Thatcher’s Island, off Cape Cod, then moved to a private estate at Freshwater Cove, near Gloucester and finally, near the end of the year, to Fort Knox, Kentucky.</p>
<p>He was the first person to become a ward of the government in what became known as <em>The Witness Protection Program</em>, a concept created by U.S. Attorney, Raymond Pettine and former attorney general, Robert Kennedy, although it was not ratified as such until 1970.</p>
<p>How all this happened came about this way:</p>
<p>Barboza drove around in a flashy auto, a <em>James Bond</em> car as the cops referred to it. A gold, 1965 Oldsmobile, with a 360 horsepower engine, white wall tyres and a hidden panel on the driver’s door which held a stash of hand guns. To the Boston P.D. it was akin to a red rag to a bull. From time to time, he was pulled over by those police officers brave enough to face up to him. It happened on the night of October 6th 1966.</p>
<p>Cruising the Red Light district of Boston which borders on Chinatown and was known as <em>The Combat Zone</em>, Barboza was stopped by a passing patrol car. Following a search of the Olds which disclosed an M-1 Carbine, a .45 semi-automatic and a hunting knife, the four occupant-Barboza and three of his crew, Arthur C. Bratsos, Nicholas S. Femia and Patrick J. Fabiano-were arrested. Joe and Femia were out on bail in connection with a stabbing that had occurred three months earlier. Because of this, and the serious weapons charge, bail for Barboza was set high at $100,000.</p>
<p>According to Vincent Teresa:</p>
<p><em>This was when the law began applying a squeeze that was to force Raymond Patriarca to make fatal mistakes.</em></p>
<p>Desperate to get out of jail, and unable to raise the money, Barboza instructed two of his crew to start hitting up people in the underworld for money to meet the bail requirements. It was then that the mob sent Joe a message.</p>
<p>Having raised a substantial amount, some sources say $60,000, others as much as $80,000, the two men, Bratsos and Thomas J. DePrisco were then shot dead on the night of November 1st. Their bullet-riddled bodies were found in Bratsos’s black Cadillac abandoned in South Boston. The money disappeared.</p>
<p>Joe Barboza was sent for trial in January, 1967, found guilty on illegal weapons charges and sentenced to four to five years in Walpole State Prison.</p>
<p>And this is when crime and justice begin to unravel in a big way.</p>
<p>The Federal Bureau of Investigation had made a decision in their Boston office to target and cultivate potential underworld sources. Two of their operatives, Dennis Condon, a homeboy from Charlestown, and his partner H. Paul Rico, from Belmont, Middlesex County, who worked together in Boston for four years from 1966 to 1970, had been trying for months to make headway through the murky swamp of North End that surrounded Gerry Angiulo and his Mafia mobsters. Their chief, J. Edgar Hoover, had created a <em>Top Hoodlum Program</em> following the infamous 1957 Mafia concave that was held at an Apalachin property in upstate New York owned by mobster Joseph Barbara,</p>
<p>Hoover instigated this program that was to be effected in every city which had an F.B.I. field office, irrespective of whether or not the mob was represented. Butte, Montana, for example went hard to work and produced damming evidence against ten juvenile delinquents. For this, they received high praise from their boss.</p>
<p>The Boston office was struggling through the late 50s and earl 60s to come up with anything that was concrete. They gathered Intel on names and places, raided gambling dens, rousted street criminals, stuff like this. But the harder they worked, it seemed the more elusive Angiulo and Patriarca and the other major figures became. It seemed a no-win situation until Joe Barboza came along.</p>
<p>Following the murder of his two crewmen, the agents visited Joe in prison, on March 8th 1967 for the first time, talking to him, trying to turn him, edging him into a sea of insecurity. They told him Patriarca had washed his hands of him, and for evidence brought along a copy of a tape from the bureau’s electronic surveillance of the mob boss’s office on Atwells Avenue. This had been bugged between March 1962 and July 1965, creating twenty-six volumes of logs. On it, Patriarca is heard cursing Joe:</p>
<p><em>Barboza’s a fucking bum. He’s expendable.</em></p>
<p>Joe Barboza eventually rolled over and testified at three trials, starting in January 1968. The first against Patriarca and Tameleo. The second against Angiulo and four other mobsters. And the third, which began in May. It was this trial that would in due course expose a level of federal law enforcement corruption on a level unheard of until this time.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003493,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003493,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237003493?profile=original" width="187" /></a>It was all about the killing of a low-level Boston criminal called Edward Teddy Degan (right). His body was found in an alley off 4th Street in Chelsea, in the early hours of March 13th 1965. He had been lured to this spot in the belief that he would be part of a gang breaking into the offices of the Beneficial Finance Company, which was located on the second floor of the Goldberg Building. A man called Roy French had approached Deegan with the offer of the job. As they gathered in that dingy back lane- French, Barboza, Ronald Casessa, Romeo Martin and Vincent James Flemmi- sometime between nine and eleven that night, Deegan was shot multiple times in the back and the head and died on the spot.</p>
<p>William Landay the author, writes:</p>
<p><em>In 1967, Barboza became a cooperating witness for the FBI and later became the first man to enter the federal Witness Protection Program.</em></p>
<p><em>His false testimony in a 1968 murder trial would ultimately unravel a story of unimaginable corruption in the FBI’s Boston office, a story in which crooked FBI agents actually protected gangster-informants while they went right on murdering people in the street. Imagine: a select few mobsters were effectively above the law, protected by the federal government. There is a straight line from the feds’ protection of Joe Barboza in the 1960s to its infamous marriage with Whitey Bulger in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. It is as if, in Chicago, Al Capone had cut a deal with Eliot Ness for FBI protection. It is the defining story of the Boston crime world.</em></p>
<p><em>The whole story is told in a congressional report called “Everything Secret Degenerates.” If the story interests you, I highly recommend it. The prose is dry and lawyerly, and there is a lot of detail, still the story leaps off the page. There are many other, less authoritative versions out there on the web.</em></p>
<p><em>Briefly, the story is this. On March 12, 1965, Barboza and a small crew murdered a small-time hood named Teddy Deegan. Six men were indicted for the Deegan murder. At trial, Barboza — by then a protected state witness — testified in detail about how the murder was planned and carried out. On July 31, 1968, after a two month trial, all six defendants were convicted. Four got the death penalty, two life in prison, all on Barboza’s word.</em></p>
<p><em>The trouble was, Barboza lied — and the FBI knew it all along. Four of the men he named — Louis Greco, Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo, and Joseph Salvati — had nothing to do with the crime. And one he did not name, Jimmy “The Bear” Flemmi, was actually one of the ringleaders and may well have been the triggerman. The day after the murder, Flemmi admitted to an FBI informant that he was in on it.</em></p>
<p><em>Why did the FBI keep silent? To protect a valued informant-witness in Barboza, no doubt. But it is also true that Jimmy The Bear had been an FBI informant for awhile, a fact the feds were eager to cover up. Flemmi was nearly as volatile as Barboza. He had told an FBI informant that he hoped “to become recognized as the No. One ‘hit man’ in this area as a contract killer.” In 1964, as the congressional report dryly puts it, “Flemmi killed an FBI informant by stabbing him fifty times and then, in a surfeit of enthusiasm, shooting him.” The FBI knew Jimmy The Bear was out of control. In September 1965, he shot another man and was charged with ABDW with intent to murder, and the feds dropped him as an informant — not because of the murder but because, according to an internal FBI memo, “any contacts with him might prove to be difficult and embarrassing.”</em></p>
<p><em>Of the four innocent men Barboza framed in the Deegan trial, two died in prison after serving almost thirty years, two others were finally released in the 1990s. The legal battle to free those men was one of the threads that ultimately unraveled the FBI’s corrupt alliance with the Boston mob, most notoriously Whitey Bulger.</em></p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003690,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003690,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237003690?profile=original" width="348" /></a>What is even more unbelievable is that the F.B.I. knew two days before the hit went down that Deegan was to be murdered. On March 10th, an underworld informant had told Agent Rico that Raymond Patriarca had ordered Flemmi to kill Deegan. And one week after the hit, a memo to Hoover from the S.A.C. in Boston confirmed that Flemmi had been present when the killing went down. Hoover tacitly approved not to prosecute Flemmi for the murder <em>as his potential outweighs the risks.</em></p>
<p>Of all the innocent men who were wrongly convicted of this crime, perhaps the most tragic is Joseph Salvati. A truck driver and a minor figure in the underworld, more of a gopher than a real criminal, he went to prison for thirty years, simply because he refused to pay back a loan of $400 to Barboza who had been acting as a loan shark in the transaction. In prison, Joe, desperate to collect owed monies to go towards his legal defence, had one of his associates demand the loan back. Salvati is alleged to have replied:</p>
<p><em>Tell Joe to go fuck himself.</em></p>
<p>He spent five years in prison for each of those words!</p>
<p>Salveti and his wife, Marie, kept their relationship going through all the long years. She poignantly described her life <em>as existing in a shoebox</em>. She said her husband did his time on the inside, she and the children on the outside.</p>
<p>Jack Zalkind, the prosecutor in the Deegan case said:</p>
<p><em>I must tell you this, that I was outraged—outraged—at the fact that if [the exculpatory documents] had ever been shown to me, we wouldn’t be sitting here . . . I certainly would never have allowed myself to prosecute this case having that knowledge. No way. . . . That information should have been in my hands. It should have been in the hands of the defence attorneys. It is outrageous, it’s terrible, and that trial shouldn’t have gone forward.</em></p>
<p><em>Barboza’s FBI handlers knew from the beginning that Joe Barboza was lying. . . . They have a witness that they knew was lying to me, and they never told me he was</em><br /> <em>lying. . . . [The FBI] figured, well, let’s flip Joe, and let Joe know that we’re not going to push him on his friend Jimmy Flemmi. So they let Joe go on and tell the story, leaving out Jimmy Flemmi; and then Jimmy Flemmi is allowed</em><br /> <em>to go on and be their informer.</em></p>
<p><em>The evidence is overwhelming that Barboza should not have been permitted to testify in the Deegan murder prosecution. Nevertheless, it was his uncorroborated testimony that was used in the Deegan prosecution that led to four men being sentenced to death and two others receiving life sentences.</em></p>
<p><em>J. Edgar Hoover crossed over the line and became a criminal himself</em>, said Vincent Garo, Mr. Salvati's lawyer. <em>He allowed a witness to lie to put an innocent man in prison so he could protect one of his informants.</em></p>
<p>And the Federal Judge who ultimately heard and determined damages on behalf of the men wrongly convicted for the killing of Deegan was equally forthright in her condemnation of the behaviour of the bureau:</p>
<p><em>I find that both men (Rico and Condon, photo right) lied in fundamental ways about their relationships with the Flemmi brothers and Barboza, about the information they had concerning the Deegan murder at the time of the trial, and their actions afterwards.</em></p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004277,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004277,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237004277?profile=original" width="239" /></a>When Barboza was originally released on parole in April, 1969, the F.B.I. sent him and his family (Joe was now reunited with Claire) to Santa Rosa, California, in the wine country, above San Francisco, where they <em>cared</em> for him. They enrolled him into the Marine Cooks and Steward’s Training School, on Mark West Spring Road, in Sonoma County. There, he trained along with others, under European cooks, to qualify to work as chefs on passenger ships and freighters.</p>
<p>It was not the first time he had been involved with cooking and maritime ventures. Sometime in the late 1960s he had shipped out on a vessel the <em>SS President Wilson</em> on a trip to the Orient, as a ship’s cook.</p>
<p>Under the alias <em>Joseph Bentley</em> which he had been allocated by the W.P.P., he worked and socialized with people in the city of 170,000. One group, included a twenty-six year old man called Clay Ricky Wilson and his wife Dee Wilson, nee Mancini, and their friends.</p>
<p>However, relocating Barboza from one part of America to another did nothing to change his attitude or temperament. In the dark nights of his soul, he carried on committing crimes-and murder.</p>
<p>Barboza bragged to this group about his true identity and how he had been responsible for sending Salvatit to prison for crossing him over a loan. He told Wilson that he had the government wrapped around his little finger, and he could manipulate them any time he wished. He told them that he could do this any time he was in trouble because all he would have to say was that he was going to change his testimony in prior trials. To him, this was merely a game of chess and he would always counteract the government’s future moves on him. He said that he could continue his violent lifestyle and get away with it.</p>
<p>Wilson was a bulldozer driver, and seemingly a couple of ants short of a picnic . In his spare time, he moonlighted as a criminal. A tall, skinny, drop-out, who still lived with his parents at1069 Emerald Court in Santa Rosa, he made the mistake in confiding in Barboza that he had robbed a home in Petaluma, of antiques and jewellery and a bundles of stocks and bonds worth about $250,000.</p>
<p>Following a dispute with Wilson, Barboza shot him dead- two in the back of the head- around the 5th or 6th of July 1970, close to midnight, and buried him in a grave in a forest near Glen Ellen, fifteen miles south-east of Santa Rosa. Two women, Dee Wilson and Paulette Ramos, witnessed the killing, but were too terrified of the killer to notify the authorities.</p>
<p>Not long after, Barboza for some reason, travelled back to Massachusetts. One theory suggests that he actually went back to sit down with the Mafia and discuss recanting his trial testimony in return for money and favours. Although in fact he had no intention of carrying out his side of the bargain. He was in essence, going to shake down the mob!</p>
<p>In typical Barboza fashion, while back in New Bedford, he became involved with a group of people in a car over a traffic dispute, produced a gun and threatened them. They notified the police of Bristol County, who quickly tracked Barboza down and found him in possession of a loaded firearm and a quantity of marijuana. He was arrested and incarcerated in Walpole State Prison.</p>
<p>He was held in a cell next to William Geraway. A forger and convicted murderer, who had killed David Sidalauskas in Quincy in April 1966, he had a memory so powerful, he would entertain Barboza by reciting Oscar Wilde's epic-length <em>Ballad of Reading Gaol</em>, a poem that runs to over four thousand words!</p>
<p>Geraway said it was not long before Barboza opened up about his time in California and described Wilson's death down to the least detail. Geraway remembered everything, from the colour of Wilson's pants to the exact description of his burial site and a description of the stump above his grave which Barboza had placed to cover up the site. A stump which was so big, it took three men from the sheriff’s department to move!</p>
<p>Geraway also claimed that Joe had told him <em>he had whacked out six people since his release by the government</em> following his trial testimony and the minimum sentence that had been imposed by the judge for his cooperation.</p>
<p>Geraway passed the information onto the local authorities in a hope of mitigating his sentence, but they showed little interest. He then, through his lawyer, had the information passed to the Santa Rosa police department on October 1st. Detective Sergeant Tim R. Brown of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s office carried out an investigation and the grave and the body, under the huge tree stump, were found in the exact place specified by Geraway, on October 12th and in due course, in February 1971, Joe Barboza was extradited back to California to face trial for yet another murder he had committed.</p>
<p>Another prisoner at Walpole, Lawrence Wood, claimed in a statement he made to the FBI on November 2nd 1970 that Barboza had also told him he had killed six people since his release in 1969, including two on the West Coast.</p>
<p>When Barboza eventually went into court, charged with first-degree murder, a crime then punishable by death in the state of California, on October 19th 1971, to say the trial was weird would be an understatement. His own public defender, Marteen Miller, claimed it was bizarre to say the least.</p>
<p><em>Here he was</em>, Miller later stated, <em>with all kinds of evidence against him in a death penalty case, and he acted like he was in small claims court. He wasn't concerned at all. I've been in that business for 34 years and I've never seen anything close to it. It was uncanny.</em> (Photo below: Miller and Barboza.)</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004861,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004861,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237004861?profile=original" width="529" /></a>Miller flew to Massachusetts to see if he could find anything of an exculpatory nature that would act in Barboza’s favour. While he found little in the way of evidence, he did discover help and assistance from an area he least expected. Rico and Condon the F.B.I. agents agreed to come to the trial and offer testimony in defence of his client. And that was not all. In addition, Edward Harrington, the chief of the Massachusetts Organized Crime Task Force, also agreed to offer support.</p>
<p>At some stage, Harrington had mentioned in an internal memorandum that F.B.I. agent Rico had told Barboza that he should leave Massachusetts because the Mafia knew he was there and that two killers had been set up to get him. The problem with this admission of course was that Barboza’s presence in Massachusetts was a direct violation of his parole agreement with the state which required he never came back. This information was never passed onto state authorities and was still another example of the duplicity of the agency in dealing with their informant.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237005085,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237005085,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237005085?profile=original" width="288" /></a>The trial took place, and Barboza pleaded out to manslaughter, irrespective that he had shot his victim in the back of the head. In support of his evidence on behalf of the defendant, Edward Harrington (left) offered the court quite an unbelievable statement:</p>
<p><em>……it is essential that the government should fulfil its commitment to Barboza to do all within its power to ensure that he suffers no harm as a result of his cooperation with the federal government.</em></p>
<p>And then according to F. Lee Bailey:</p>
<p><em>Barboza was sentenced to 5 years to life and, was hustled off to Montana to some country club to serve his time.</em></p>
<p>Marteen Miller said he figured during the trial that the federal officers appeared on Barboza's behalf because they were afraid he would recant the testimony he had given at the Boston trials. At one time, Rico offered to lie for the defence, according to a statement later made by Miller who also commented:</p>
<p><em>Is this the stuff the FBI gets away with?</em></p>
<p>But he said he wondered at the time why they didn't let Joe go ahead and then simply laugh him out of court. :</p>
<p><em>Evidently</em>, Miller reported, <em>now it appears their motive was a little farther reaching than that.</em></p>
<p>Marteen Miller told the House Committee on Government Reform in 2003, that the FBI <em>was absolutely fearful that Barboza would receive the death penalty, fearing he might recant his testimony as a government witness in past trials if sentenced to death.</em> To assist with Barboza's defense, Mr. Miller said that then-U.S. Attorney Edward Harrington and FBI agents H. Paul Rico and Dennis Condon <em>were fully cooperative in testifying on behalf of Barboza</em>. Mr. Miller commented that in his 40 years as a criminal defence attorney, Barboza was the only individual to be convicted of second degree murder yet only serve 4 years in prison.</p>
<p>The 1971 trial was a local sensation, with Barboza mugging for the cameras, threats against witnesses, and even talk of sequestering the jury to protect them from possible Mafia intimidation. Before he left for prison, he sent a quote to a court reporter for the Press Democrat newspaper:</p>
<p><em>It was a pleasure to be living Santa Rosa.</em></p>
<p>Ed Cameron, an inspector in the Sonoma County District Attorney’s office who worked the Clay Wilson murder, was outraged at the manipulation of the trial by the government’s representatives.</p>
<p><em>This fellow Barboza murdered one of our street punk criminals who was not a heavyweight by any stretch of the imagination, he said. But he didn't deserve to get killed. And he got killed as a direct result of letting this animal back out on the street. And it turns out his testimony was false to start with. It's damn well unbelievable right up until today.</em></p>
<p>Within a month of Barboza entering the prison system, Edward Harrington began campaigning for his parole, the first letter, dated January 19th, 1972, including:</p>
<p><em>The government also requests that Barboza’s significant contribution to law enforcement in the organized crime field be weighed when his eligibility for parole is considered.</em></p>
<p>Edward F. Harrington, by now a United States senior judge, was still defending crooked agents of the F.B.I. twenty-six years later, when he gave evidence in 2008 in a court in Florida, in support of John J. Connolly Junior who had been indicted on murder and conspiracy charges and who according to the sentencing judge, was another agent <em>who had crossed over to the dark side.</em></p>
<p>In May, 1972, Joe Barboza was called to Washington D.C to give evidence at a select committee on crime investigating organized crime’s involvement in horse racing.<br /> Vincent Teresa said:</p>
<p><em>The committee did not know what time of day it was. They had Barboza testifying about fixing races. He never fixed a race in his life. He was an enforcer, a mob assassin, not a money man.</em></p>
<p>For good measure, Joe also threw in that Frank Sinatra was in bed with organized crime, stating he had been told personally by Raymond Patriarca that the singer held front points for him in the Fontainbleau Hotel in Miami Beach and the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. He also told the committee:</p>
<p><em>I was an enforcer that kept the other enforcers in line.</em></p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237005283,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237005283,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237005283?profile=original" width="522" /></a><em><strong>Joe Barboza testifying before select committee</strong></em></p>
<p>In July 1973, Harrington travelled to Montana to appear before the parole board as a character witness for Barboza.</p>
<p>Barboza was moved to a bewildering variety of penal facilities in the short, forty-three months period he spent behind bars.</p>
<p>He started in Santa Rosa jail, then went to Vacaville, Tehachapie, Washington State, Folsom, Eel River Montana, Deer Lodge Montana, Missoula County jail, San Quentin and finally, on October 30th 1975 was quietly released from the Sierra Conservation Centre near Jamestown, about one hundred miles east of San Francisco. His prison time was not without incident. On one occasion, on December 17th 1973, he attacked a guard and broke his jaw, which resulted in the transfer to San Quentin.</p>
<p>Barboza while in prison, drafted out an idea for a book to be called <em>In and Outside of the Family</em>, and used a friend from Lynn, Massachusetts, James Jimmy Chalmas, aka Theodore Sharliss, a Greek-American now living in San Francisco, to carry out negotiations with the writer chosen to ghost the story, Bob Patterson. Barboza and Chalmas had first met when they both in prison in the late 1950s and had been friends until Chalmas left Boston. Although this project never went ahead, Barboza did eventually create a manuscript which was sent to famous crime author Hank Messick to edit into another book, which was published in 1975. Joe also filled in time by writing poetry and painting-he was it seems a very talented artist. His verse was less so, somewhat naïve and inept.</p>
<p>The book ghost written by Messick, carried a foreword by Edward Harrington. Perhaps the first and only time a book by a mass murderer was endorsed by a senior figure in the American judiciary system. (Harrington is currently a senior judge in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts.)</p>
<p>Harrington informed Joseph Barboza by letter at his prison in Deer Lodge, Montana in December 1972:</p>
<p><em>I will be very happy to meet with your ghost writer and provide him background on you and your dealings with the organization here in New England and your significance as the first government witness to testify against the organization in this area.</em></p>
<p><em>. . . I will be quite happy to write some remarks in the preface extolling</em><br /> <em>your contribution to law enforcement in the organized crime</em><br /> <em>field.</em></p>
<p>Released after four years in prison, Joe Barboza had four months left to live.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006082,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006082,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006082?profile=original" width="137" /></a>Now calling himself Joe Donati, he moved in with Jimmy Chalmas (left) and his wife, Regina, who lived at 1710 25th Avenue, in the Sunset district of San Francisco. Chalmas had a severe alcohol and drug problem at this time and was seemingly very unstable. He was known to the police as a bookmaker and extortionist. Unknown to the police, he was also an informant for the F.B.I and had been since the early 1970s.</p>
<p>Joe lived with them from November 1st until the 15th when along with his girlfriend, thirty-two year old Maggie Delfel, he moved into a $250 a month apartment at 1250 La Playa Street, one block back from the beach, and just south of the Golden Gate Park, in the Outer Richmond district of the city. They seemingly lived an uneasy, but quiet life here, making causal acquaintances, of other residents in the building, but no close friends.</p>
<p>He would visit Jimmy almost every day, and soon had a job, which may have been set up by Chalmas, as a chef at the Rathskeller Restaurant in Turk Street, two blocks north of City Hall. It was an interesting choice of job locations for Joe, as the noisy, downstairs bar and food hall was a popular place for the police to meet after their shifts had finished.</p>
<p>In the few weeks he lived in San Francisco, Joe could not resist the temptation of easy money, and tried setting up a number of extortion schemes with porn shops and strip clubs that infested the area around <em>The Tenderloin District</em>, in the city centre. It was rumoured that the Mafia in San Francisco had asked for the help of Los Angles based Mafioso, Aledena Fratiano to sort the problem out, but that he had deferred it to Boston. Barboza was often found at <em>Luigi’s</em> or <em>La Pentera</em>, restaurants in the city, which he frequented three or four nights a week.</p>
<p>On Wednesday, February 11th 1976, Joe Barboza visited Jimmy Chalmas at his home. Joe was wearing a sports coat and slacks. His wallet contained $300 and he had a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver tucked into his belt. The two men went to a nearby deli for lunch and returned late in the afternoon. At approximately 3:40PM, Joe said goodbye to his friend, telling him he was going off to pick up a prescription at a pharmacy, and walked the few yards to Moraga Street where he had parked his car, a light blue, two-door 1969 Ford Thunderbird.</p>
<p>As he went to open his car, a white Ford Econoline panel van pulled alongside him. Its sliding door opened. Joe, obviously suspicious was turning, reaching for his gun, when two men appeared in the van’s entrance. A witness claimed one man was tall, wearing a red ski mask. He was holding a shotgun. The other man was shielded by this first gunman, and pointing a rifle of some kind. The guns went off, the noise booming across the quiet intersection. The rifle shot missed Joe, burying itself in the interior of the car, The shooter with the semi-automatic shotgun did not. Three times he racked and fired, the weapon. Thirty 00 buckshot rounds hammered into Joe’s body above his right hip, tearing open his intestines, eviscerating him, rupturing his liver and lungs, bursting his body open like a watermelon stamped on hard. He was dead before he hit the asphalt.</p>
<p>In his last seconds of life, Joe Barboza was heard screaming out:</p>
<p><em>You fuckers! You fuckers!</em></p>
<p>Was he cursing the men who were killing him, or maybe all the men he himself had killed over his short and brutal life?</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006885,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006885,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006885?profile=original" width="750" /></a><strong><em>The house three down from the corner is where Jimmy Chalmas lived.</em></strong></p>
<p>The van screamed away down the road, and was found abandoned five blocks away. The shotgun, a 1912 Winchester 12 gauge, and a rifle, along with some spent shotgun shells had been discarded inside, the killers long gone.</p>
<p>Chalmas rushed from his home on hearing the shots, and found Joe slumped against the side of his car, sprawled in a widening pool of blood. Homicide detectives from the San Francisco police department under Lt. Charles Ellis visited Chalmas that night, and questioned him extensively. From the first, the police investigators knew this was a mob hit, but it was some time before all the dots were connected.</p>
<p>That night, the news was played on the radios at the MCI medium security prison in Norfolk, Massachusetts. Henry Tameleo and Peter Limone were housed there, and the prisoners broke out in cheering and yelling that went on for over an hour, celebrating the death of a rat and pay-back in some form at least, for the four men who had already spent years in prison for a crime they never committed.</p>
<p>On May 24th 1976, an airtel from the Boston office of the F.B.I. to the one in San Francisco, stated that an informant had passed on word that Sharliss (Chalmas) was to be murdered by <em>The Office</em> as they were concerned he might <em>fold</em> under interrogation by law enforcement.</p>
<p>The San Francisco office contacted Sharliss with this information. Four days later, while being question by agents, Sharliss confessed that he had notified Boston Mafia capo Joseph Russo that Barboza visited him on a regular basis, and that he believed Russo had shot Joe. In October or November 1975, he stated that he had met with Russo in the dining room at the Hilton Hotel in downtown San Francisco and that Russo had offered him $25000 to kill Barboza. Sharliss said that he had refused. He also told the agents that he had spoken by telephone with Russo less that forty-eight hours before Barboza died.</p>
<p>On October 28th 1978, Jimmy Chalmas now living in Chula Vista, south of San Diego, was indicted in connection with the murder.</p>
<p>On January 24th 1979, he was charged with violation of Title 18 USC, Section 241, Civil Rights-Murder and Conspiracy. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in the custody of the Attorney General under a plea agreement of complete cooperation and testimony against those responsible for the murder of Joe Barboza.</p>
<p>On November 28th 1980 the S.A.C. in the Boston office of the F.B.I. contacted the current head of the bureau, William H. Webster, confirming that they had evidence placing Joseph Russo in San Francisco hours before the hit on Barboza.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006683,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237006683,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237006683?profile=original" width="137" /></a>The case against Russo for the murder dragged on for another eleven years until May 1990 when Russo along with other members of the New England Mafia were indicted on various charges, including the killing of Barboza. In January 1992, Russo (right) pleaded guilty to killing Joe Barboza and was sentenced to sixteen years in prison and fined $758,000.</p>
<p>It had taken fourteen years to bring someone to justice for the murder of Joe Barboza, but only one of the three involved paid the price. The drive of the van, and the other shooter were never traced. It was almost a given that the Boston family would have coordinated their activities with the head of the San Francisco Mafia family, James Lanza in the planning and preparation for the hit on Barboza. If nothing else, common courtesy would have demanded it. The F.B.I gathered information that indicated the getaway van had been bought some weeks before the killing. Joe Cerrito of the San Jose Mafia family forty one miles south of San Francisco, was apparently concerned that one of his men, Joe Piazza who had carried out the purchase assisted by two other members of the family, Angelo Marino and Manny Figlia, might be indicted for their part in the killing of Barboza, although this never eventuated.</p>
<p>It was another seventeen years before justice was served on the four men wrongly convicted and imprisoned because of the perjured testimony of Barboza in his Faustian pact with the government.</p>
<p>In the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Peter J. Limone et al versus United States of America, Judge Nancy Gertner found on July 26th 2007 that:</p>
<p><em>Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo, and Edward Greco were originally sentenced to death by electrocution. Joseph Salvati was sentenced to life in prison. And though two were finally released in recent years, it is fair to say that all of them literally lost a lifetime. I find that their losses were proximately caused by the malicious prosecution, negligence, and conspiracies engaged in by the government.</em></p>
<p><em>Losses of this magnitude are almost impossible to catalogue. The loss of liberty. The loss of the enjoyment of their families. The loss of the ability to care for and nurture their children. The loss of intimacy and closeness with their spouses. Indeed,</em><br /> <em>the task of quantifying these losses -- which I am obliged to do -</em><br /> <em>- is among the most difficult this Court has ever had to undertake.</em></p>
<p>She did a good job, awarding damages of over $100,000,000 to the plaintiff’s and their families.</p>
<p>In 2009, the First Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in Boston Massachusetts dubbed the FBI's conduct <em>outrageous</em> and <em>a sad chapter in the annals of federal law enforcement</em>, in upholding a lower court judgment of $101,750,000 against the federal government for its 30-year cover-up in helping a <em>Top Echelon</em> informant secure convictions of four men for a murder they did not commit.</p>
<p>The murky, sometimes incomprehensible manoeuvrings that surrounded Joseph Barboza and the Boston underworld, helped create an urban landscape where cops and robbers became at times, almost indistinguishable. Barboza’s story is one of bribery, corruption, deceit and the seduction of power that would rival anything by Zola or Dostoevsky. But no one should be above the law, including and especially, lawmakers.</p>
<p>No one is born evil. Evil is taught to us.</p>
<p>Shakespeare’s Iago appears in Othelo as simply pure evil. To constantly lie and deceive your friends and your wife, you must be evil, or amoral. To steal and kill without the slightest feeling of guilt you must be guilty of a level of sin that goes beyond natural boundaries. Iago appears in the play as a Machiavellian schemer and manipulator, a trusted soldier of the Moor whom he betrays. It has been rightly determined that evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the evil character of Iago. The analogy between him and Joe Barboza is compelling.</p>
<p>Joe Barboza even went past this line. Possessing a keen intellect, he was fluent in three languages and had an above average IQ. The thing he lacked of course, was a conscience. He killed often for pragmatic reasons-to remove an obstacle, fulfil a promise, earn a reward-but he also killed because it was convenient or simply because he did not care. The example of the old lady in the house he wanted to burn down with her dying as collateral damage is a good example of this.</p>
<p>The philosophical dilemma inherent in the presence of evil has long plagued philosophers.</p>
<p>The New Testament uses a number of terms to describe evil including Anomia-non observance of a law, and Parabisis-to transgress. Those of us who never knowingly adopt this vocabulary of sin are considered normal and law-abiding. People like Barboza had no idea they even existed.</p>
<p>What was Barboza? A mass murderer. A serial killer. A mob executioner?</p>
<p>In essence, these are simply categories of evil. His body count was high, somewhere between seven and thirty or more, making him a suitable candidate for all of these descriptions.</p>
<p>His own murder has made it impossible for any real study of a man who was a minefield of paradox and dissonance. A classic example of someone suffering from ASPD-antisocial personality disorder, showing the characteristic persuasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others, something that began in his childhood and continued throughout his life.</p>
<p>Maybe as a child, he fell on his head or was subject to a form of viral infection that damaged him irreparably for life, causing some kind of psychological meltdown. Add to this, his broken home upbringing-his drunken father left him and his mother and siblings to fend for themselves in the late 1930s. By his early teens, Barboza was an incorrigible thief and troublemaker embarking on a career that would take him in only one possible direction-to that quiet street in suburban San Francisco.</p>
<p>The fact that he was helped on that journey with considerable assistance, by members of the premier law enforcement agency in the country, is something that perhaps even William Shakespeare might find hard to adapt into one of his many tragedies. The evil of Barboza in this story is only matched by perhaps an even bigger evil, displayed by servants of the government who in their own twisted way, sought to justify an end by whatever means they thought was necessary.</p>
<p>Joseph Barboza, like most people, was not all evil. He loved animals, especially dogs; he treated children with care and respect-would often buy popcorn at cinemas for those too poor to afford it. Most of the men who worked in his crew were loyal to the point where it got them killed. There were two women who loved him enough to marry him. His daughter, Jackie, grew up without realizing just what her father was and broke her heart when she finally discovered the truth, hidden from her for years by her mother, in a class on organized crime she attended in college.</p>
<p>Something, somewhere, went terribly wrong. And that is what we will remember about Joe Barboza.</p>
<p><em>Joe Barboza was a cold-blooded killer. They gave him a new identity. They put him in the middle of an unsuspecting community. They put him on the payroll. And he killed again. At that point they should have locked him up and thrown away the key. They did just the opposite. They did everything they could to get him back on the street. Joe Barboza was murdered himself in 1976. I have to wonder, if he hadn't been killed, how many murders would they have let him commit before the Justice Department decided to reign him in?</em></p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Dan Burton, chairman House Government Reform Committee, 2003.</span></p>
<p><em>It is better to die on your feet,</em><br /> <em>than to live on your knees,</em><br /> <em>And know your concepts are sound.</em></p>
<p><em>Than to try to run, hide and scurry,</em><br /> <em>Out of fear of the dirt, the earth and the ground.</em></p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;">An excerpt from Boston’s Gang Wars written by Joe Barboza in Folsom Prison.</span></p>
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The Slaughter at Slaughterhouse Square
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-slaughter-at-slaughterhouse-square
2011-09-16T11:00:00.000Z
2011-09-16T11:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><p><a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-slaughter-at-slaughterhouse-square"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237003461,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237003461?profile=original" width="487" /></a>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> It was bloodletting out of all proportion, even for the men who ran the Mafia in Sicily.<br /> <br /> Eight men killed for eighteen horses.<br /> <br /> The worst day of mass killing in its history since May 1947, when 11 people were shot dead and 33 wounded by Salvatore Giuliano’s bandit gang at Portella della Ginestra, near San Giuseppe Jato; an act that many historians believe was in fact instigated by the Mafia on behalf of political patrons in Palermo and Rome. <br /> <br /> Those people died to protect the ambitions of others and the reputations of men who never had them to start with.<br /> <br /> The dead in Palermo’s Settecannoli district were gunned down to feed revenge and perhaps again, to satisfy Mafia politics. <br /> <br /> Sometime during the late evening of October 17th, 1984, a group of gunmen entered a squalid, dingy, group of stables, on a narrow lane leading off the Piazza Scaffa in the working-class district known as the ‘Bronx’ of the city, lying to the south and east of the main Palermo central city area, and killed eight men. <br /> <br /> Next morning, the police received two telephone calls, informing them of a shooting at the stables. The first ‘Flying Squad’ cars came hurtling down the Corso dei Mille, lights flashing, horns blaring everyone awake.<br /> <br /> They arrived just after eight, turning off the Piazza Scaffa and crawling down the dirt track, north, past the piles of wreckage, rusting auto hulks and small mountains of garbage and junk. <br /> <br /> As they pulled up in the small square, <em>Cortile Macello</em>, Slaughterhouse Square, outside the stables, they saw an elderly man dragging a blood soaked corpse out of the building and towards a battered old Fiat 127. They stopped him and checked the body, the mutilated head, wrapped in a wool sweater. The dead man was subsequently identified as Paolo Canale, a young man, twenty-four years old, who lived by scavenging junk and rubbish in the area.<br /> <br /> The man told the officers that horses were running wild in the stables and that they were trampling on his son’s face. He couldn’t bear to see that, and so he was taking him home. <br /> <br /> Moving into the feculent atmosphere of the dilapidated courtyard, the officers found two dead men lying face down in the mud and animal manure, next to a water trough, horses wandering around, stepping over the corpses.<br /> <br /> Moving cautiously into the first of the two stable buildings, through the mass of skinny, red-skinned foals, the ram-shackled building lit only by a single, naked light bulb swinging gently in the morning breeze, they found among other horses, hooves splashed in bright red blood, two more men, sprawled loosely in death. Moving into the second building, overpowered by the stink of animal ordure and rotten straw, the policemen found inside, three more dead.<br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004053,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004053,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237004053?profile=original" width="487" /></a>The courtyard and buildings were soon filled with a mass of police investigators. Hardened as they must have been to the violence and death which filled their lives, wading as they did, through the never-ending sewer of crimes flooding a city which had become more like Beirut than Palermo since the explosion of the second Great Mafia War in 1981, many of these men must have found it hard to keep their breakfasts where they belonged.<br /> <br /> The medical experts and forensic specialists arrive and soon determine that all the bodies have been shot, repeatedly. Autopsies would disclose each man received wounds from shotguns and pistols.<br /> <br /> The investigators re-constructed the massacre:<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004090,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004090,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237004090?profile=original" width="335" /></a>A group of gunmen, maybe ten or more (although later reports indicated it may have been as few as two) had arrived late the previous evening, probably around midnight or 1: AM. <br /> <br /> They kill the first three victims. This group including Paola Canale, died outside the stables, near the water trough. The five survivors retreated into the stables where two are shot down in the first chamber. The three remaining men scrambled into the second stable where they were trapped-no external doors or windows. Lined up against a back wall they are cut down, collapsing in a tangled heap in this dark, smelly chamber of death. It is all over in minutes. <br /> <br /> The killers leave. Night takes over. <br /> <br /> The dead are all young men. The oldest thirty-eight, the youngest twenty-three. Four are linked by kinship, the others connected by friendship or job opportunity. Shot repeatedly, some are initially unrecognizable-ruptured flesh, shattered bones and brain matter sprinkled around and on the bodies, the confetti of violent death broadcast by grim reapers who come, kill and disappear without any apparent dislocation to the people who live all around in this miserable part of the city. News of the massacre was in fact circulating around the neighbourhood before the police arrived.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004276,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237004276,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237004276?profile=original" width="408" /></a>Among the detritus of the stables-old saddles, bridles, bits and other horse-tack, the investigators find a religious card pinned to a beam. It says:<br /> <br /> <em>Heart of Jesus bless and protect our family</em>. <br /> <br /> The bodies are collected in sheets and carried by undertakers wearing rubber gloves out of the buildings, and placed into wooden coffins before being shipped by vans into Palermo City and the morgue.<br /> <br /> Slaughterhouse Square was the property of a man well-known to the law in an area often under police observation, as a place where drug-dealers, extortionists and petty criminals would gather.<br /> <br /> The stables belonged to a man called Giovanni Ambrogio, father of eighteen children, who had himself, according to pentiti Stefano Calzetta, been shot dead in March 1981 by the men of the Corso dei Mille Mafia clan, lead by the fearsome and unpredictable Filippo Marchese, a man who it was claimed personally murdered fifty-eight of his victims and at times would masturbate as he watched them die lingering deaths. <br /> <br /> Ambrogio was repairing a scooter in the yard when a gunmen walked up and shot him four times in the head. A junk dealer (scrap metal), Ambrogio was a man who operated on the fringes of the Palermo underworld. He had apparently fallen foul of Marchese’s clan in a dispute over stolen trucks.<br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237005661,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237005661,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237005661?profile=original" width="133" /></a>Marchese himself was murdered in 1982 and his place was taken by Pietro Vernego (right), a major drug trafficker, known as ‘Bazooka Eyes’ because of his piercing stare. An equally terrifying man, it was claimed he had personally murdered 100 men, burying their bodies in liquid cement or having them dissolved in acid.<br /> <br /> In their initial investigation of the mass killing at Slaughterhouse Square, the police were certain of only one thing. Vernego would have had to give his blessing. Nothing of this magnitude could have gone down without his okay. An act as egregious as this needed to be signed off by the Mafia potentate of Settecannoli/Brancaccio at least; maybe endorsed by others.<br /> <br /> Two days after the massacre, the families of the dead men congregated in the mortuary on the ground floor of The Institute of Forensic Medicine in Ospedale Cirico on Via Carmelo Lazzaro in Palermo City.<br /> <br /> Pushing the police guards aside, they performed the age-old Sicilian ceremony of dressing and preparing their dead for burial. It was a short journey from the hospital to the Cemetery of Sant’Orsola. It’s unlikely any of the two hundred people who gathered for the burial service, humble people accustomed to living with hardship and violence in their lives, would have dwelt on the significance of the graveyard and the nearby Chiesa dello Spirito Santo-church of the Holy Spirit. It was here, according to legend, that Sicilians had risen up against the tyranny of the French occupation forces in 1282, leading it was believed, to the formation of the Mafia.<br /> <br /> If any of them had, the irony of the situation would surely have not been lost: the Mafia created according to this legend, by the workers to protect the workers gathered in this very graveyard, was now responsible for welcoming eight of those same workers to their graves in this same place.<br /> <br /> Within days, the police had pieced together the movements of the dead on that final, and truly fateful day.<br /> <br /> The eight men, arriving from different parts of the city, converged on the stables at Slaughterhouse Square with the inevitability of a train heading for a viaduct that was no longer there. <br /> <br /> Cosimo and his brother Fransceso Quattrocchi were horse traders and butchers. Cosimo and his wife, Pietra Lo Verso, also ran a butcher shop in the city, in the famous market at Piazza di Ballarò. <br /> <br /> Salvatore Schimmenti, who was known to the police, but as more of a ‘minor’ delinquent than a serious criminal, was employed by the Aquedotto Sicilliano, the national water supply agency for Sicily, and was also involved in the horse trading business, working part-time for the Quattrocchi brothers. Cosimo and Marcello Angelli were cousins of the Quattrochis, and worked for them from time to time as required.<br /> <br /> The previous September, Francesco Quattrocchi and Schimmenti had travelled over to Molfetta in Puglia to purchase a small herd of horses, mainly foals, which arrived late on Thursday evening at the Palermo railway station. The five men had herded the horses into a large van, making two trips to deliver them to the stables in Settecaloni.<br /> <br /> Waiting there to meet the deliveries were three men:<br /> <br /> Giovanni Catalanotti, who hawked fruit and vegetables around the neighbourhood of Corso Dei Mille, and stabled his horse here. Another minor criminal, he has been arrested for carrying an illegal weapon. <br /> <br /> Also at the yard were Paolo Canale, a trader in scrap metal and junk, who nevertheless, according to his wife Lucia Russo, made a good living, earning up to 100,000 lira a day, and Antonino Federico, an unemployed bar-hopper, well-known in the Piazza Scaffa area. His father, Raffaele and his five brothers were all fishermen. He was the only one not to take to the sea as a livelihood.<br /> <br /> The eight all died in a blazing crescendo of noise and light and were left scattered around the yard and stables like broken and discarded dolls.<br /> <br /> The father of Paolo Canale, worried why his son had not returned home the previous night, had arrived at the stables to find himself in a parent’s worst nightmare and in his grief and confusion only wanted to return his dead son to the family. He was trying to do this just as the first police arrived on the scene. <br /> <br /> The authorities puzzled over the motives for this mass murders. A killing of this magnitude seemed to indicate a powerful force in play. In Sicily, this would almost always indicate the Mafia.<br /> <br /> Among the many hypothesis explored were:<br /> <br /> Perhaps the Quattrocchi brothers had decided to stop paying the local Mafia family protection and had been taught a lesson as an example to others.<br /> <br /> Had the men been involved in some sort of drug trafficking operation that had gone badly wrong? The police scoured the stables and surrounding areas using trained drug dogs and even X-Rayed some of the horses in case they had been forced to swallow bags of drugs.<br /> <br /> Did the killings link into the lucrative world of clandestine horse racing in Palermo, or the black market in butchering and selling the meat of stolen horses? Illegal racing of horses was endemic in Sicily, with at times whole streets in cities sometimes closed off for events to take place. It was estimated that the Mafia could be making up to $500 million a year from this enterprise across the island.<br /> <br /> Gery Palazzotto, the author of <em>Fotofinish</em>, a book on the subject of illegal racing in Sicily, claimed ‘it is absolutely clear that Cosa Nostra was up to its neck in these races.’<br /> <br /> Was there a connection into the murder of a Quattrocchi cousin, another Cosimo, shot dead in a pig-sty in February, 1982, in Misilmeri, nine miles south of Palermo City?<br /> <br /> Did the brothers Quattrocchi use their premises for illegal gambling and did this lead to the murders?<br /> <br /> Days before the killing, pentiti, Tommasso Buscetta’s evidence had led to arrest warrants being sworn out against 366 suspected Mafiosi across Sicily. Perhaps the slaughter in Settecannoli was simply confirming that despite the police crackdown, the Mafia families of Palermo were still all-powerful and fully in control of their districts. They could kill when and how they pleased. This mafia had no intention of raising the white flag! The killings were simply affirmation of their power.<br /> <br /> Pietra Lo Verso, the wife of Cosimo Quattrocchi was questioned by the chief of police at the Carini barracks.<br /> <br /> ‘Your husband did something, or they would not have killed him,’ he said.<br /> <br /> ‘It was Antonino Fisichella from Catania who did it,’ she said. Lo Verso knew what she knew, and it was this:<br /> <br /> One day, her husband had brought home for lunch, five men from the province of Catania. One of them he called ‘Uncle Ninu’, a tall, distinguished looking horse-trader named Antonino Fisichella who lived and ran his business in Zafferana Etnea. Cosimo entered into an agreement with him to purchase horses for his butchering business. Fisichella guaranteed Cosimo protection from any outside interference, but only on condition that the Quattrocchi’s bought their animal stock only from him.<br /> <br /> At some stage, the Catania horse-dealer started sending Cosimo butchered meat in contravention of Palermo’s bye-laws that meat had to be slaughtered locally. In due course, the authorities discovered the infringement, and suspended Cosimo’s license.<br /> <br /> It seemed the problem was eventually resolved, and Fisichella sealed their arrangement with a gift-a gilded, ornamental clock, embraced by painted shepherds, topped with a fake Fabergé egg. <br /> <br /> Cosimo however, had lost faith in the dealer from the other side of the island, and started negotiating to buy animals from a dealer on the mainland.<br /> <br /> When he was away organizing the purchase, Fisichella phoned asking for him, and in all innocence, Pietra told him her husband was in Bari.<br /> <br /> As Clara Hemphill said in her article <em>Life and Death in Palermo</em>:<br /> <br /> ‘Don’t eliminate the middleman when the middleman is a Mafioso.’ <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237005873,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237005873,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237005873?profile=original" width="145" /></a>Pietra Lo Verso would wonder in the months to come whether or not she had signed off her husband’s death certificate while he was still alive.<br /> <br /> Six weeks after the killings, the police arrested three men from Catania province.<br /> <br /> The warrants were signed off by Palermo judiciaries Guido Lo Forte, Dino Cerami and Paolo Giudici following intensive investigations between Palermo and Catania involving the wholesale meat trade and the part played in it by the Mafia. <br /> <br /> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9237005694,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9237005694,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9237005694?profile=original" width="243" /></a>The three men were all connected into the Mafia clans of Catania run by Salvatore Pillera (left), or by Benedetto Santapaola (right), who himself was on the run from the law for his involvement in the killing of Vito Lipari, the mayor of Castelvetrano. <br /> <br /> The police also indicted the two main clan heads of the areas adjacent to the killing site:<br /> <br /> Pietro Vernengo, boss of Corso dei Mille and Carmelo Zanca, who called himself, <em>Senor Lupo</em>, and who headed up the Torrelunga cosca just to the south.<br /> <br /> The three men from Catania were: Antonino Fisichella, Antonino Resina and Agatino Castorina.<br /> <br /> Giuseppe Marchese, a nephew of Fillipo, who became a pentiti or informer for the state against the Mafia, confirmed that Salvatore Riina the Sicilian boss of bosses had wanted to embarrass ‘Pino’ Greco the head of the <em>mandemento</em> that controlled the area of Brancaccio/Settecaloni. This is, in the Sicilian Mafia, a district of generally three or more geographically contiguous Mafia families controlled by a senior capo or boss. <br /> <br /> Riina was at odds with Greco, and for him (Riina) to endorse a crime of this magnitude without informing the man who controlled the whole district would send a strong message to the rest of the Mafia clans across the island. ‘Pino’ was out of favor. He was no longer in Toto Riina’s heart, so to speak. <br /> <br /> Riina would often de-legitimize an opponent in the Sicilian Mafia by the spread of slander or by ‘sneak’ moves like this as a prelude to weakening his support within the organization.<br /> <br /> ‘Pino’s own time would come late in the following year when he was shot dead by two of his best friends in his home, in September 1985. By then he had developed, according to informants, into a hopeless cocaine user, becoming not only an embarrassment for Cosa Nostra but, also a real danger because of his addiction. Riina had the body dissolved in acid and then spread the rumor that ‘Pino’ had skipped to America to lay low for a while. A long while as it turned out.<br /> <br /> Paolo Borsellino the famous anti-Mafia judge who was murdered in 1992, was allocated the case of the murdered horse dealers et al. He and his team of prosecutors gathered the evidence and presented it at trial.<br /> <br /> It was generally suspected that the killers were after Cosimo Quattrocci and that the other seven victims were collateral damage. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were witnesses to the murder of the butcher, and so were eliminated.<br /> <br /> The first trial was adjourned in favor of the defendants as was the second. All the accused were acquitted by order of the Palermo Corte di Assise d’Appello.<br /> <br /> Attorney General Vittorio Algro said of the judgment:<br /> <br /> ‘The contested decision is the result of incomplete and biased assessment of the findings of the proceedings. It is flawed in several respects and unacceptable in the inconsistencies and illogical interpretations of what was determined.’<br /> <br /> The crux of the appellants appeals were based on the testimony of pentiti Vincenzo Sinagra, and the disclosures of Tommaso Buscetta, a Mafioso who had returned to Sicily to help the anti-Mafia judges lay the groundwork for what became known as ‘The Maxi-Trial’ in which hundreds of Mafiosi were tried and convicted, in Palermo, in 1986.<br /> <br /> Both of the these men had in effect confirmed that the massacre could not have taken place without the consent and approval of the local clan heads. And Fisichella would not have had the power to operate in Palermo without the approval of Benedetto Santapaola who in turn would have sought the blessing of the Mafia’s omnipotent czar in Sicily, Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina. <br /> <br /> The prosecutors in their summary, had hammered away at their belief that the crime was undoubtedly a crime of the Mafia. It was unthinkable that the murder of eight people committed in an area of strong Mafia presence, could be carried out without the permission of the Mafia boss of that area.<br /> <br /> However, the presiding judges determined in their own strange and convoluted way that as these men, the boss of Catania and the two local clan chiefs, were not currently ‘on board’ so to speak, all three of them being fugitives from justice, then they could not have given their approval, and therefore could not have been responsible for what happened. There could be no connection. Therefore there could be no verdict of guilt.<br /> <br /> Without this link being proved to the judge’s satisfaction, the case in their opinion, had no legs. Two minor players in the case, horse traders from the mainland, Biagio D’Amico and Rocco La Torre were acquitted on their charges of perjury<br /> <br /> It may well have been a classic attribute substitution cognitive bias-making a complex, difficult judgement by unconsciously substituting an easier judgement<br /> <br /> The judge’s decision was handed down on April 12th. 1988.<br /> <br /> The wives and families of the murdered men had to gather together the broken threads of their lives and somehow carry on.<br /> <br /> Pietra Lo Verso was the only one to come forward as a plaintiff at the trial.<br /> <br /> In court, she came face-to-face with Antonino Fisichella, identifying him for the judge.<br /> <br /> ‘I’ve never seen this woman before in my life,’ he said.<br /> <br /> ‘You’ve had dinner in my house,’ Pietra replied. ‘I can tell you what you had to eat.’<br /> <br /> The horse trader looked down at her and told her she was mad.<br /> <br /> Unfortunately the judges agreed, and concluded her story was a wild exaggeration.<br /> <br /> Following the furore generated by notorious Mafia killings prior to Piazza Scaffa- the 1971 assassination of Judge Pietro Scaglione, the murder of Carabinieri Colonel, Giuseppe Russo in 1977, and the blatant hit on the chief of the Palermo Squadro Mobile, Boris Giuliano, in a bar, in 1979, as well as the killing of Michele Reina, the Palermo head of the Democratic Party, in the same year, followed by the murders of Piersanti Mattarella, president of the Region of Sicily and Captain Emanuele Basile of the Carabinieri in 1980, and then the wholesale attack against the judicial system with the killing of Chief Prosecutor Gaetano Costa in August 1980, and the slaughter in 1983 of Judge Rocco Chinici and three others by a bomb placed in a car outside his apartment building- the massacre at Settecannoli/Branccacio aroused the interest of the Italian Parliament. <br /> <br /> On October 23rd at a session of the IX Legislature in Rome, Vice-President Giuseppe Allaro fielded questions about the recent killings. Politicians demanded to know what measures the government intended to take for the prevention and repression of Mafia crimes. Slaughterhouse Square represented a most serious and blatant attack on society-a level of intimidation above and beyond the mere settling of score between gangs of criminals, but more an attack by the Mafia on the whole community.<br /> <br /> The Mafia, for the previous 50 years, like Leafy Spurge, the weed that plagues the American West had been digging down and establishing roots that once established would be almost impossible to eradicate. Giuseppe Allaro and every sane man in the government knew it was not going away quickly.<br /> <br /> The rampage and killings of the 70s and 80s, became a reign of terror generated by the ambition of Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina, the psychopathic terminator from the Corleone clan. He instigated the slaughter of hundreds of people- rivals in the Mafia, members of the judiciary, investigators and policemen, both state and carabinieri, reporters, businessmen, and the ones that would be known as <em>excellent cadavers</em> or ‘distinguished corpses,’ the servants of the state <br /> <br /> And the hundreds of others- people simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, including wives and children as well as husbands and brothers and fathers and boyfriends – using sawn-off shotguns, Kalashnikovs, acid vats, liquid cement, and the bombs, so many bombs, going off all over the island. And even worse if that could ever be possible, the ones who simply disappeared, recipients’ of what was known in the trade as <em>lupara bianca</em>, the white shotgun. <br /> <br /> To paraphrase William Shakespeare, the politicians could protest too much, but to what avail? <br /> <br /> Jonathon Jones a journalist with The Guardian newspaper claims the art of politics is an Italian invention - politics as a self-conscious way of acting and thinking. A modern awareness that human affairs are not transparent, but devious, complex and unpredictable, dates from the Italian Renaissance with its mixture of ruthlessness, ambition, fantasy, failure and self-knowledge given voice by the first modern political thinker, Niccolò Machiavelli. The Mafia may have been alive then, in some form or another, and if so, would have undoubtedly agreed.<br /> <br /> As long as the balance of power within the Christian Democratic Party lay with the votes controlled by the men of the Mafia in Sicily, the truth would also be the first victim.<br /> <br /> In the exquisite novel <em>The Leopard</em>, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, about a Sicily in perpetual transition, the author describes the instability of truth in Sicily: ‘Nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily: a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, annihilated by imagination and self-interest: shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves on the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether’<br /> <br /> Giuseppe di Lampedusa ruminated in his book:<br /> <br /> ‘This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments to the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us... All these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.’ <br /> <br /> The principal character in the book, the Prince of Salina, claims that Sicily’s passion is a love affair with death; that a desire for the grave obsesses the island's culture and will seep out of Sicily to poison the new Italy.<br /> <br /> ‘Our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our languor, our exotic vices, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is for death again.’<br /> <br /> In Sicilian tradition, the drive for power and the accumulation of riches are considered a prelude of death. The Mafioso acts with the finality of someone running a race he knows he is destined to lose. Giovanni Falcone, in his last interview with French journalist Marcelle Padovani referred to the Mafia as the ‘culture of death,’ insisting that this qualification applied not only to the Mafia, but also to everything<br /> Sicilian. He went on to say:<br /> <br /> ‘Solitude, pessimism, death are the themes of our literature from Pirandello to Sciascia. It is as if we were people who have lived too long and all of a sudden feel tired, drained, emptied, like Don Fabrizio in <em>The Leopard</em>. Affinities between Sicily and the Mafia are many. I surely am not the first to say so. If I do it is not to incriminate all Sicilians. On the contrary I do it to make clear what is the battle against Cosa Nostra. It requires not only a specialization in the subject of organized crime, but also a special interdisciplinary preparation.’<br /> <br /> As 1984 was drawing to a close, Sicily had to be content with the anguish and sorrow generated by the slaughter at Slaughterhouse Square of the eight unfortunates who were simply trying to make a living in a city that at times seemed a hopelessly inhospitable place, as a way of satiating this desire.<br /> <br /> It was becoming all too obvious that the state had become a sclerotic element in the presence of Mafia intimidation-a simulacra of a government lost to the trade-winds of a force beyond its control.<br /> <br /> There were at least ten more years of agony and heartbreak ahead for an island in the sun that seemed to live most of the time in the dark shadow of death.<br /> <br /> Pietro Vernego, Benedetto Santapaolo and Carmelo Zanca were all eventually arrested and are now serving life sentences at prisons across Italy for various acts of criminality. Antonino Fisichella and the two other men from Catania province disappeared from public view and are now merely names on documents archived and consigned to history.<br /> <br /> Clara Hemphill, the American author and former CBS television reporter, visited the widows of the slain men in November, 1984. She found them living in vast, anonymous housing estates in the poor, working-class districts of the city.<br /> <br /> With their husbands dead, they struggled to manage their family lives and survive in a society that seemingly had little time for people who lived on the fringes of the underworld. The deck was stacked against them, these <em>popolini</em>, the underclass of Sicily, and their future was uncertain. Their will to even just survive, would be a true <em>sfrida</em>, a challenge, but one beyond monumental.<br /> <br /> The men who killed the butcher Quattrocchi and the other seven men that night, not only destroyed their victims, they also dislocated their families for a generation, or more. And what may have been worse, with their men gone, it was after all for really nothing, and the dead were soon like all the dead, history.<br /> <br /> Giovanna Terranova the widow of Judge Cesare Terranove, assassinated by the Mafia five years before Slaughter House Square, remembered, ‘Being killed is terrible, but being forgotten is even worse. It’s like dying twice.’<br /> <br /> And for why?<br /> <br /> To satisfy greed or anger or avenge an insult? <br /> <br /> Or did the killings take place simply to send this message to the authorities: <br /> <br /> The Mafia was still the boss, and that the revelations of Buscetta and Contorno and all the pentiti to follow, and the Maxi-Trial and the prison sentences, would simply create a stumble, but the Mafia would never fall down, no matter what the State tried to do.<br /> <br /> It was here to stay and everyone would have to just settle down and accept that.<br /> </p>
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Get ’The Right Man’: How the FBN nailed Vito Genovese
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/get-the-right-man-how-the-fbn
2010-11-24T19:59:33.000Z
2010-11-24T19:59:33.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10663249884?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=372"></div><div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> It begins and ends with a man who had a name that sounded like a musk melon.<br /> <br /> His impact on the American Mafia was much more than to just have helped the law incarcerate a man who at the time, they considered perhaps the most powerful hoodlum in the country. By helping to nail him and thus sending him to prison, he created a chain of events that would have perhaps, the most significant repercussions on Italian-American organized crime since its recognized inception in 1931. <br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236978491,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236978491?profile=original" />The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) had been following Vito Genovese (right) for some time.<br /> <br /> Henry Giordono, the Commissioner of the bureau said:<br /> <br /> ‘We have to go after him. He’s too big to be ignored. We have no choice, and we’ll get him, not matter how long it takes.’<br /> <br /> Following the ill-fated <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/mob-meeting-at-apalachin-the">Apalachin mob meeting</a> held towards the end of 1957 in up-state New York, the largest office of the FBN was instructed to target Genovese as a main opportunity to take down in the bureau’s never-ending war on drug trafficking. Their underworld informants kept pointing to him as a major link in the heroin trail that stretched north into Canada, and from the biggest city in the United States, outwards across the entire continent.<br /> <br /> The agents, men referred to as ‘The Wolves’ by the mob underworld, kept digging away, following up leads, questioning hundreds of suspects, looking for the missing link that would connect them into a conspiracy of drug trafficking which would help them nail the top New York hoodlum who was known to his peers as ‘The Right Man.’<br /> <br /> It was Agent Anthony Consoli who first came across the name of Nelson Cantellops.<br /> One of the agent’s informants, a small time Puerto Rican drug-pedlar, told him about the man who was his supplier. A man who was apparently linked into Vito Genovese through his drug activities. A dealer who was, therefore, through this connection, well-linked into the New York underworld. It took a while to track him down, but Consoli finally found Cantellops in the Tombs, the big, dank and depressing city jail in Lower Manhattan, on the corner of Centre and Franklin. He’d been charged with possession of narcotics. <br /> <br /> It was 1957.<br /> <br /> The prisoner, whose full name was Nelson Silva Cantellops, was short and chubby, with bulging eyes set deep in a sallow face. He was also a Puerto Rican, in his early thirties, and had an arrest record in New Jersey going back to 1949 when he was first indicted and served three years at Trenton State Prison for obtaining money under false pretences.<br /> <br /> He was back in prison in 1952 for attempted forgery, and in 1956, received six months for marijuana possession. At this point in his career, he moved his area of operations over to Manhattan, where he worked as a card-sharp, con-man and drug trafficker. Nelson was your everyday low level scumbag street criminal, a man destined for an early grave or a finite jail sentence, whichever came first. <br /> <br /> He did however, have a major part to play in the bureau’s war on drug trafficking.<br /> <br /> For some reason, Consoli sensed something tangible could be wrested from this little man with the funny name. Agents questioned him daily after he was transferred to a federal detention centre, but they got nowhere. He put on a brave front, claiming he would be ’looked after’ by his friends in the underworld. His trial came up, he was found guilty, and with his long record as a recommendation, the presiding judge sent him away to Sing Sing Prison, in upstate New York, for four years. Nelson had a lot of baggage-a wife, children, girlfriend, mistress, they all needed him for something.<br /> <br /> Two weeks after he was locked away, the bureau arranged to have him transferred to the Westchester County Jail, a much more pleasant venue than the grim prison at Ossining, and Cantellops began to co-operate with them. No one had come forward to ’fix’ his arrest, as he had been promised. It was par for the course with mobsters. They promised the earth and most times delivered nothing. And so because of their laxness, things rebounded on them, often with a terminal velocity. <br /> <br /> Following an in-depth interrogation by William Tendesky, an Assistant U.S. Attorney specializing in drug cases, the prosecutor came out of the interview room and told FBN agent John R. Enright:<br /> <br /> ‘We’re going to indict Vito Genovese!’<br /> <br /> Cantellops claimed he’d moved into the narcotic business in the spring of 1955 as a way of paying off a loan shark, a man called Charles Barcellona. Known to his peers as ‘Charlie the Wop’ the fourty-year Sicilian born, was a member of the crime family run by Albert Anastasia. A seasoned criminal with an arrest record dating back twenty years, which included violation of Federal and State Narcotics laws, Barcellona was, according to mob informant, Joe Valachi a ‘hitter‘ for the family. Also known as ‘Jacky Balls,’ his close friends for some reason, called him ‘Dummy.’ He’d spent a lot of time in prison, and had a particular hatred for cops, having taken his first beating from them when he was only nine years old. He in turn, introduced Cantellops to a man called Joe Di Palermo who set up the drug arrangement. The deal was that Nelson would deliver a ‘package’ to a man in Las Vegas. The package was ten pounds of heroin with a street value of $250,000, and the man it was destined for was Louis Fiano, a California narcotics trafficker. <br /> <br /> In March, 1955, Cantellops had attended a meeting at Al's Luncheonette at 34 East 4th Street, New York, to be briefed on his assignment. At this meeting along with Charles Barcellona, were Ralph Polizzano, his brother Carmine, Joseph Di Palermo and Anthony Colonna. Men whose lives were lived dangerously, moving in and out of drug deals with a confidence born of long experience. Cantellops agreed to transport the narcotics for the group. At the airport bus stop, in New York while Barcellona was talking to Cantellops, an unidentified man handed Cantellops the package. For this delivery, Cantellops was paid $1000 by Barcellona. <br /> <br /> He travelled by air to Los Angeles, on to Reno, and then by bus to Vegas. It went smoothly, and other ‘trips’ followed: to Miami, Tampa, Key West, Philadelphia and the Virgin Island. Nelson was a busy boy. His loan shark debt cleared, he earned $500 for each trip he made, sometimes as high as $1000. On his first visit to Cleveland, in July 1956, he was taken there by a man called Vincent Gigante, a young hoodlum working at the bottom of the ladder in the crime family that included Genovese. People called him ‘Chin,’ but not because of his large, jutting jaw line. ‘Chin’ was a nickname his mother, Yolanda, had given him as a child, “Cincenzo,” abbreviated to Chin, and it stuck with him through the rest of his life. <br /> <br /> Although Cantellops was driven on this occasion by a man from the Genovese family, he was apparently doing a job for John Ormento, a capo in the Luchese Crime Family. In what now seems an extraordinary breach of mob protocol, Joe Di Palermo a soldier in the family, had introduced Cantellops to Ormento, and subsequently to Carmine Galante, the then under boss of the Bonanno crime family. <br /> <br /> ‘Big John’ as he was known to his peers, was the consummate drug trafficker of his time, and had been a dealer since his teen years, operating initially in East Harlem, the traditional home of the 107th Street Mob, which morphed into the Gagliano and then the Luchese Crime Family following the underworld struggle now referred to as the Castellammarese War of 1930-31.<br /> <br /> In a complex operation, typical of the drug dealing mentality, Gigante dropped Nelson off at a bus stop at a town called Loraine, about thirty miles west of Cleveland. He then caught a bus into the city and went to a hotel with the drug package. He left this with the hotel room clerk, telling him it was for his wife and then went outside to be met by Di Palermo’s brother, Charley. Nelson went back into the hotel, retrieved the package, and the two men caught a cab, stopping to pick up a woman at a pre-determined spot. The cab drove back to the hotel, the two men left the cab, the woman, and the drug package. Cantellops then took a Greyhound bus back to New York.<br /> <br /> The FBN needed to check Nelson’s story, which they did in meticulous detail, cross-referencing schedules on aircraft, buses, taxis, whatever form of transportation he claimed to have used in his various drug courier travels. They even verified weather conditions against his claims, looking for anything that would discredit him. He checked out to their satisfaction.<br /> <br /> In October, 1955, Carmine Polizzano's had asked Cantellops to investigate the policy banks in the Eldridge Street area on Manhattan's lower East Side to find out whether they might be used as a front for narcotics distribution. After Cantellops had carried out his survey, Polizzano then invited him to a meeting at his brother Ralph’s apartment at 57 East 4th Street. This meeting was attended by Ralph and Carmine Polizzano, Joseph Di Palermo, John Russo, John Ormento and Benjamin Levine. The group discussed taking over and operating these policy banks as a cover for the distribution of narcotics. Cantellops told the men assembled in the apartment that it might cost between $100,000 and $150,000 to purchase the banks in the Eldridge Street area. The group reached no final decision as it was agreed that the matters would have to be discussed with ‘The Right Man,’ who was Vito Genovese. <br /> <br /> At this time, Genovese was a senior member of the family administration, maybe the underboss to Frank Costello who had taken over the running of the family in 1937 when the then street boss, Genovese, had skipped the country to avoid arrest in a murder inquiry. Genovese had returned in 1946 and been cleared of his involvement in the killing of an underworld hoodlum called Ferdinand Boccia. <br /> <br /> The meeting at the East Village apartment also discussed the possibility of importing narcotics through Puerto Rico because of turmoil in Cuba and recent misfortunes regarding two shipments by boat. Cantellops suggested the use of the Island of Vieques, off Puerto Rico, as a distributing point, a suggestion that was never acted on.<br /> <br /> According to Cantellops, his first contact with ‘The Right Man’ was initiated when he was approached by Carmine Polizzano, a man who was seemingly close to Vito Genovese. Nelson claimed that the first time he saw Genovese, he was sitting in a car with Polizzano, in Greenwich Village. This was in December, 1955. He saw him again, he claimed six months later. Some sources, including court transcripts, claim this second conclave actually took place nine months later, in September, 1956.<br /> <br /> This meet seemingly revolved around discussion to take over the East Bronx policy banks, which were operated by independent, Spanish speaking mobsters. Genovese wanted to take control, to use these networks to also distribute heroin in this area of upper Manhattan. The Eldridge Street operation had apparently never been consummated, and this may have been an alternative that Genovese wanted to explore.<br /> <br /> At some point in August, 1956, Cantellops visited a German restaurant in Manhattan with Ormento and a man called Joe Evola. While in the restaurant, Ormento went over and spoke to Vito Genovese who was sitting, dining with a woman. Genovese allegedly looked across at Nelson and remarked something like ‘he looks okay to me,’ signalling Genovese’s approval.<br /> <br /> Sitting at the bar, close enough to hear the conversation, were two agents of the FBN, Francis Waters and John Hunt. The subsequent Genovese drug indictment was actually formed around their corroborating testimony. <br /> <br /> At the end of August, or early September 1956, Cantellops attended a meeting at the home of Rocco Mazzie, at 2332 Seymour Avenue in the Bronx, where plans were made for extending the distribution of narcotics. <br /> <br /> Earlier, the same evening Cantellops drove to the same German restaurant on East 86th Street with Joe Evola, Ormento, Carmine Galante and Andimo Pappadio, a capo in the Luchese family, and a man close to John Ormento and Genovese. <br /> <br /> Galante was with the Bonanno family, along with Evola; Ormento, and Pappadio were with the Luchese’s, and Mazzie was tied into the crime family known to-day as the Gambino family, run then, by Albert Anastasia. <br /> <br /> After Ormento made a telephone call, they all drove to the West Side Highway and met another car. Cantellops and Ormento entered the other car which was driven by Vincent Gigante. Ormento introduced Cantellops to Genovese, who was sitting in the back seat, saying to Genovese ‘This man is doing a good job for us. He is helping us and doing a good job for us.’ Ormento told Cantellops ‘This is the Right Man.’ Genovese said to Cantellops that they were going to a meeting where territorial control was to be discussed; that the people at the meeting were counting on Cantellops to help them and that Cantellops could earn some money by doing so. <br /> This three-minute conversation was to be perhaps, one of the most significant encounters in mob history.<br /> <br /> The two automobiles drove to Mazzie's home and everyone entered except Genovese and Gigante, who stayed outside. <br /> <br /> Joe Evola, Mazzie, Ormento, Pappadio, Galante and Cantellops discussed the distribution of narcotics in the Spanish market in the East Bronx,(( the area bordered by Longwood Avenue and Fox Street, west of Hunt’s Point)) by use of policy banks, and sealing off the area to eliminate competing narcotics peddlers and policy operators so that they could control the narcotics traffic in this area. Evola and Pappadio thought that the plan would take a month or a month and a half to complete and the others agreed. <br /> <br /> After twenty or thirty minutes Genovese came in. He wanted to know ‘what was the decision on the plan; what they had in mind.’ When he was told about the discussion which had taken place, Genovese said that he needed this information because he wanted to know when to send his men into the area. Later, in the presence of Evola, Ormento, Pappadio and Galante, Cantellops was advised that he would be the contact man for the distribution of narcotics in this area. Cantellops later delivered narcotics in this area at Ormento's request. <br /> <br /> For the next nine months, Cantellops continued to work with Ormento and other mob traffickers, until he was arrested in early July, 1957. Although Ormento had promised Cantellops that he would be taken care of in the event of an arrest, nothing transpired. He was convicted and sent off to Sing Sing. While these events were developing, Genovese, Ormento, Evola and many other members of the American Mafia had their lives seriously disrupted in November, when they were corralled at the <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/mob-meeting-at-apalachin-the">Apalachin mob meeting</a>. <br /> <br /> The FBN spent a full year screening Cantellops and validating his story, before submitting the facts to a federal grand jury and obtaining indictments against Genovese and 16 of his associates, One of these, was Vincent Gigante, who was arrested only four weeks after his acquittal in the attempted murder charge on Frank Costello.<br /> <br /> On July 7th, 1958, FBN agents arrested Genovese and 53 other defendants and 14 co-conspirators involved in the conspiracy. Of this group, only Genovese and 16 others were actually indicted. Two of them, evaded the law and did not appear for trial. The two who escaped arrest were Carmine Galante and John Ormento. Those detained were charged with conspiracy to import, conceal and sell heroin.<br /> <br /> On January 5th 1959, the group went on trial. The charges laid against them, in full, were:<br /> <br /> Conspiracy to import and smuggle narcotics into the United States.<br /> To receive, conceal, possess, buy and sell the drugs.<br /> To dilute, mix and adulterate the drugs prior to distribution.<br /> To distribute the drugs.<br /> <br /> On April 17th they were all found guilty and sentenced from five to twenty years. Vito Genovese was given fifteen years. He was initially confined in the Atlanta Penitentiary. The rest of the conspirators were sentenced as under:<br /> <br /> Vincent Gigante-7 years. Soldier, Genovese family.<br /> Joe Evola-10 years. Capo, Bonanno family.<br /> Carmine Polizanno- 8years. Associate, Genovese family.<br /> Ralph Polizanno-7 years. Associate, Genovese family<br /> Salvatore Santora-20 years. Capo, Luchese family.<br /> Joseph DiPalermo-15 years. Soldier, Luchese family.<br /> Charlie DiPalermo-20 years. Soldier, Luchese family.<br /> Rocco Mazzie-12 years. Soldier, Anastasia family<br /> Charles Barcellona-5 years. Soldier, Anastasia family.<br /> Daniel Lessa-14 years. Associate, Luchese family.<br /> Nicky Lessa-12 years. Soldier, Luchese family.<br /> Alfredo Aviles-10 years. Associate.<br /> Benjamin Rodriques-10 years. Associate. <br /> Jean Capece-5 years. <br /> <br /> For his help in making the case Cantellops had his prison sentenced commuted by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. There was a story that went around following the case, that the inmates of the federal Atlanta Penitentiary, refused to be served cantaloupe melon at meal times.<br /> <br /> The FBN kept after Galante and John Ormento, A line of enquiry followed by agents Martin Pera and James Hunt lead them to a homicide enquiry in the NYPD 48th Precinct in the Bronx. An elderly man had been attacked in his apartment. He’d worked as a processing chemist for one of the drug groups linked into Genovese. Detectives theorized he’d been killed to stop him testifying at the upcoming trial. Before he’d died, the man had given the police a description of his killer, and through their investigation, the agents determined he was a known criminal called Nicolas Tolentino. Often called ‘Big Nose’ for fairly obvious reasons, Nick Tolentino, a fifty year old New Yorker, was a soldier in the Luchese family, and like so many of its members, a consummate drug trafficker<br /> <br /> Interestingly enough, a detective at the precinct house, Tommy Martino, had actually met this man at a function held at the home of a local, and well-known building contractor, David Giampa.<br /> <br /> The agency carried out surveillance on Giampa, who was seen making frequent visits to an apartment building at 1466 East Gun Hill Road, in the Baychester section of the Bronx. A three story red-brick building, it stood on the corner of Adee Avenue. The agents saw Giampa carrying in bags of groceries and laundry, obviously supplying someone who was hiding out in the building.<br /> <br /> One evening, it was April 1st 1959, the agents followed Giampa to an apartment on the third floor, and there, surprised Ormento and Nick Tolentino. They, along with Giampa were arrested and taken into custody. <br /> <br /> Exactly two months later, Agent Pera and his current partner, Bill Rowan, organized and helped carry out the arrest of <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/death-in-the-afternoon-the">Carmine Galante</a> on a New Jersey freeway.<br /> <br /> In due course, both Ormento and Galante were indicted, tried and convicted on narcotic charges. John Ormento went off to prison where he died in 1974. Galante also spent time, serving a twelve year sentence, before being released in early 1974.<br /> <br /> The investigation and trial of Vito Genovese had been long and torturous. <br /> <br /> It is not generally realized that Cantellops’ testimony, resulted in the indictment and incarceration of a bigger, and much more important group of drug traffickers than the famous ‘French Connection’ case that was to follow a few years later.<br /> <br /> For the last fifty years, crime historians have argued over the validity of the conviction and sentence. Frank Selvaggi, a senior agent in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, called it ‘The frame of the century.’<br /> <br /> The late Ralph Salerno, famous NYPD organized crime detective, believed it almost in conceivable that Vito Genovese would deal with someone like Cantellops.<br /> <br /> On appeal, the government admitted it had suppressed evidence in the trial. Edward Bennett Williams, one of the best criminal lawyers practising at this time, argued brilliantly for Genovese. When he was congratulated him on his performance, he said, ‘Thanks, but there's not a chance. They won't let Genovese out. They'll call it harmless error.’ Which they did, and generally do, when they know the error is harmful in Mafia cases. <br /> <br /> Rumours have long existed that Cantellops had been approached by a cartel of mobsters anxious to remove Genovese from the frame, for their own personal reasons.<br /> <br /> These four men, according to these underworld rumours, Charley Luciano in Naples, Italy, and Frank Costello, Myer Lansky and Carlo Gambino in America, had put up a $100,000 bribe to induce Nelson to co-operate with the narcotic bureau and help convict Genovese. Costello would obviously have a vested reason in doing this, bearing in mind that he almost certainly knew Genovese was behind the attempt on his life. A rider to the bribe was that it had to include Gigante in the conspiracy so that he would do time as penance for his bungled attempt on Frank. Jimmy ‘Blue Eyes’ Alo, a senior capo in the Genovese family, is alleged to have arranged for an intermediately to travel to Sing Sing prison, and present Cantellops with the deal. It’s cute and cheesy, like a plot out of a Hank Jansen novel. But as a compelling reason upon which to build a hypotheses, about as ephemeral as a butterfly.<br /> <br /> Costello presumably had little or no respect for Genovese following the abortive attack on him, carried out on the night of May 2, 1957. The man who allegedly shot Frank was tentatively identified as Vincent Gigante, a soldier in the crew of skipper, Tommy Eboli. The attack on Frank was part of an orchestrated plan by Genovese to take back control of the family, which he had relinquished when he fled to Italy in 1937 to avoid prosecution. <br /> <br /> Frank would have realized only Genovese would have had the nerve to make a strike against him. So it’s certain Costello would have lost no sleep over Vito and Gigante going down and doing time, but there is no evidence whatsoever that links these two men into some convoluted drug conspiracy deal involving two sitting New York mob chiefs, one exiled in Italy, and a major Jewish gangster like Lansky. <br /> <br /> Also, what this theory overlooks of course, is the huge amount of detailed information Cantellops supplied to the FBN covering people, places and dates, which allowed the agency to construct the case. In addition, although his command of English wasn’t the best, Cantellops spent a week on the witness stand at the trial on direct, and four weeks undergoing cross-examination by the numerous lawyers employed by the defendants. He was so convincing, the jury had no hesitation in bringing in guilty verdicts against all those charged.<br /> <br /> In one of the numerous appeals that resulted from the trial, it was stated that Cantellops was a key witness for the Government, and that he had a long criminal record, including perjury before a grand jury. On this appeal the appellants laid great stress upon the character of Cantellops. <br /> <br /> The Court in its opinion stated (p. 190):<br /> <br /> ‘They argue that his testimony should have been stricken, that no defendant may be convicted on Cantellops' uncorroborated testimony, and that the indictment should have been dismissed. We do not agree. It was for the jury to judge the witness Cantellops on the basis of all that was brought out about his character, his previous activities.’ <br /> <br /> The Court further stated on the same page:<br /> <br /> ‘It is for the jury to say whether his testimony at trial is truthful, in whole or in part, in the light of the witness' demeanour, his explanations and all the evidence in the case.’<br /> <br /> It has been claimed that there was no way Genovese would have allowed himself to have been seen in the company of a low level drug dealer like Cantellops. On the other hand, had this low level dealer been the potential conduit to huge amounts of money, it strikes me as more than likely Genovese would have wanted to check him out. Also, the powerful mob boss was almost certainly arrogant in his use of power. He knew, as did everyone around him, that he could have squashed Cantellops like a bug (or a melon.) This kind of attitude could well have made Genovese careless. And, in all fairness to Nelson Cantellops, he admitted that he only actually physically met Genovese briefly, on that one evening on the way to the Bronx meeting.<br /> <br /> At the end of the day, maybe the case against Genovese was not unlike the one that banjoed his former boss , Charley ‘Lucky’ Luciano. He was tried and convicted on a prostitution case, which put him away for thirty years in 1936. Cynics at the time said that the government, unable to lock one on Lucky for all the bad stuff he had actually done, found a way to convict him and put him away for something he hadn’t really done. The ends justifying the means so to speak.<br /> <br /> Et tu Don Vitone perhaps? <br /> <br /> Maybe, but I think unlikely.<br /> <br /> Nelson Cantellops did more than just help send Vito Genovese to prison however. He set in motion a chain of events that would have a devastating impact on organized crime across the United States.<br /> <br /> Joseph Valachi, was the first member of the Mafia, in America, to reveal publicly its history, structure, and membership in significant detail, at least in New York. Interestingly enough, no one was ever indicted or convicted as a result of his revelations, but he set the precedent for mob informants that would not be matched again until the early 1990s.<br /> <br /> ‘Between Scylla and Charybdis‘ is the origin of the phrase ‘between the rock and the whirlpool‘ (the rock upon which Scylla dwelt and the whirlpool of Charybdis). These two monsters in Greek mythology inhabited opposites sides of the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and Italy. Odysseus, during his great quest, had to sail through these waters and choose which monster to confront. The saying may also be the genesis of the phrase ‘between a rock and a hard place.’<br /> <br /> That’s where Joe Valachi found himself on the morning of June 22, 1962 <br /> <br /> A soldier in the crime family controlled by Genovese, he’d had to graft his way through life, like all of its members. The strength of Cosa Nostra as the mob called itself, was the fear it generated among ‘ordinary’ citizens, giving its soldiers and captains an edge in their business activities. Many of the lower-level members of the mob however, struggled daily to make a decent living. Just being a Mafioso wasn’t a guarantee of success.<br /> <br /> Valachi probably lost more than he won in his years as a member.<br /> <br /> He was inducted into the family that eventually was to be controlled by Joseph Bonanno, in November 1930. Subsequently, he transferred to the crime family of Charley Luciano, after the murder of Salvatore Maranzano, who had in fact headed up the group that had organized his initiation. This transfer took place sometime in late 1931, maybe September or October.<br /> <br /> Interestingly, Joe Valachi had actually started his mob career as an associate of yet another mob family in New York, this one led by Gaetano Gagliano, (now know as the Luchese Family,) and it’s from this group that he transferred his allegiance to Maranzano, who had allied his men with Gagliano in what was to become known as ‘The Castellammarese War,’ an underground struggle for dominance between at least four warring factions made up of Sicilian, Neapolitan and Calabrian gangsters in the New York underworld.<br /> <br /> Joseph Valachi was one of very few men in mob history who multi-tasked his way through multiple crime families in the Mafia as he burned a career for himself as a hit-man, extortionist, drug dealer and all-round hoodlum.<br /> <br /> Over the next twenty-eight years, he became involved in loan-sharking, slot-machines, pin-ball machines, the numbers racket, owning and running restaurants, dress manufacturing and linen-hiring businesses, owning racehorses, and during World War Two, the lucrative gas-rationing stamps fraud activity.<br /> <br /> His downfall had been brought about by drug trafficking. Frank Costello, then head of Valachi’s crime family, had in 1948, laid down an order forbidding his members from handling drugs. He recognized the danger that the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was to the mob and wanted no part of it. But a lot of the members could not resists the huge profits and relatively easy money to be made out of narcotics.<br /> <br /> The FBN had Valachi listed in their ‘Black Book,’ their directory of known and suspected drug dealers. They’d been observing and tracking him since the mid-1940s, and by 1956 he was eventually arrested, convicted and sentenced to prison for five years for his part in a drug conspiracy, that also involved his brother-in-law, Giancomo Reina. Reina was one of 8 children, and one sister, Mildred, was Valachi’s wife. Their father, Gaetano, had headed up one of those four mob families back in the 1920s, the first that Valachi had been attached to, and his death may have in fact triggered off the Castellammarese War.<br /> <br /> Valachi managed to evade this particular indictment however. Released on bail pending an appeal, his conviction was reversed. He had in fact been linked into his first drug deal as early as 1952, which escaped detection by the FBN.<br /> <br /> By 1957, strapped for money ( a not unusual occurrence for mobsters due to their flagrant lifestyle, gambling habits and often on-going high legal expenses,) he turned again to narcotics for a quick fix. However, in May 1959, he learned that the FBN were after him, and fled New York, moving upstate to live in hiding, and then east across into Connecticut, settling at a trailer camp in a small community in Thompsonville, squeezed in between the Connecticut River and State Highway 91, close to the border of Massachusetts. <br /> <br /> In the middle of November, one of Valachi’s associates, a man called Ralph Wagner, who’d made heroin deliveries for Joe, literally dropped a dime on Valachi. Arrested by the FNB, Wagner found a way to contact Valachi, who gave him a pay phone number near the caravan park. When Joe went to the station at a pre-arranged time to accept a call from Wagner, FBN agents were waiting to arrest him.<br /> <br /> Assured by his mob bosses that the fix was in, and that incarceration would be light, Valachi was in fact sentenced to a term of fifteen years, and sent to serve it at the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia.<br /> <br /> In August 1962, Valachi was returned to New York as a co-defendant in yet another narcotics case, this one involving Vincent Mauro and Frank Caruso, along with Albert and Vito Agueci. Mauro and Caruso were part of the crew headed by Anthony Strollo, Genovese’s right-hand man. The Agueci brothers, from Sicily, were connected into the Buffalo mob, headed by Stefano Maggadino. Joe lost out on this one again, and received a further twenty year sentence, to be served concurrently with the one he was already doing.<br /> <br /> While in New York, the FBN put pressure on him to roll-over and become an informant, telling him that Strollo had gone missing, and was believed murdered on the orders of his best friend and boss, Vito Genovese. The agents also inferred that Joe was next on Genovese’s list of house-cleaning. With these thoughts pressing down on him, Joe was returned to Atlanta.<br /> <br /> Here, he became the central character in a bizarre theatre of manipulation, hidden threats and Machiavellian manoeuvres orchestrated by Vito Genovese.<br /> <br /> The Don suggested that Joe move into his cell, and share it with the other inmates there, a group of four or five. Genovese kept on at Joe, questioning him about his latest drug conviction, hinting that perhaps he had collaborated with Mauro and Caruso, insinuating that he had not received his cut from these various narcotic transactions and also confirming in an indirect way, that he had been responsible for the death of Strollo. <br /> <br /> Vito Agueci was also sent down to Atlanta following his conviction, and began associated closely with inmates Johnny Diouguardi, and Joe DiPalermo, both members of the Luchese family. Valachi began to believe that Agueci was feeding Genovese information through these two men that he was talking to the FBN (which at this time he wasn’t.) Gradually, Joe started to think that Genovese and the other mob inmates were shunning him, isolating him away from the few prisoners he had become close to. One day, DiPalermo offered him a steak sandwich, claiming he had smuggled it out of the prison kitchen. Fearing it was poisoned, Joe threw it in the trash. He stopped using the showers, especially after he was encouraged by Diougardi to do so, fearing the isolation and exposure there, and the possibility of attack. <br /> <br /> One night in June, in the cell, Genovese sat talking to him, rambling on about bad apples and how they should be removed; then kissing Joe, for old time’s sake, and asking after the health of his grandchildren, planting seeds, sowing doubts and fear into the mind of a man already on the breaking edge.<br /> <br /> In desperation, Joe demanded that the guards incarcerate him in a solitary cell, claiming his life was in danger. This gave him a few days respite, but then he was released, as the prison governor could not be convinced there were grounds for his fears.<br /> <br /> Joseph Valachi reached his epiphany early in the morning of June 22, 1963. Wandering around the prison grounds, terrified of each and every inmate who passed him, he saw three men moving slowly towards him. There had been construction taking place in the complex, and he grabbed a piece of iron piping as a weapon to defend himself. As Joe DiPalermo, the man he considered his principal tormentor, walked past, he lashed out, striking him in the head. Joe then chased off the other three men, returning to beat DiPalermo to death. Except he killed the wrong man.<br /> <br /> His victim, John Saupp, was in prison for mail robbery and forgery, a minor, inconsequential petty criminal. His misfortune was to bear a striking resemblance to DiPalermo, especially in profile. Distraught and full of remorse for killing an innocent man, Valachi eventually began cooperating, first with the FBN and then the FBI, who took control of him on behalf of the Justice Department. And the rest is history.<br /> <br /> After a massive, lengthy de-briefing by the government, Joseph Valachi, guarded by agents of the FBI and the US Marshalls, was taken to Washington D.C. in September 1963 to appear before an investigative subcommittee headed by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas. It was here that the world first became aware of Joseph Valachi, who was also known in the New York underworld as Joe Cago and Joe Cargo, Joe Kato and Joseph Siano. On his first arrest in November 1921, he had called himself Anthony Sorge.<br /> <br /> Short and squat, with crew-cut gray hair, sucking on a lemon, to help his drying throat, Joe Valachi spoke for thirty-one hours over a seven day period, from September 27th. <br /> <br /> Introduced by Robert Kennedy, the US Attorney General, he sat facing the committee, under the glare of lights and the gaze of three major television network cameras, answering questions and explaining the structure of organized crime ‘families’ in the USA, and for the first time, confirming the hierarchy by names, and especially the heads of the five New York mobs. <br /> <br /> Republic senator Karl Mundt was so confused by the litany of death, mayhem and Joe’s scrambled Bronx vocabulary, he said at one point:<br /> <br /> ‘You’re getting me all confused. It sounds like a Chinese Chess game.”<br /> <br /> To some in the hall, it sounded like a fairy tale. No one had come prepared for the intensity of Joe’s revelations. Democrat Edward Muskie thought the whole thing a waste of time.<br /> <br /> Much of what he disclosed, confirmed information that the FBI and the FBN had already obtained, from illegal wiretaps. He described in detail, hundreds of members, specifying minute trivia about them: who they worked for, their knick-names, their social contacts. <br /> <br /> ‘They eliminated the term boss of all bosses’ said Joe at one point in his testimony, ‘but Vito Genovese is just that, under the table.’<br /> <br /> In his defence, he was rarely if ever, caught short by his handlers. Although a lot of what he described was already known to the law enforcement agencies, his real danger to the mob was an ability to create a schematic view of the structure of organized crime, describing chapter and verse, how it functioned. Opening up a book that had forever been closed until now. In essence, he was able to convince law enforcement to stop looking at the Mafia’s criminal acts as simply isolated, unconnected crimes; instead, he forced them into approaching organized crime as a huge, inter-locking matrix of self-serving dimensions, allowing the law to adopt a radical new philosophy in its fight against this so-far almost hidden enemy, on an intercontinental scale never before contemplated.<br /> <br /> It was generally assumed that Valachi disclosed the term ’Cosa Nostra’ for the first time. In fact, the FBI and other federal agencies had heard the denomination used before. <br /> <br /> In 1961 and 1962, these agencies were spelling it in their reports as:<br /> ‘Causa Nostra.’ It was an expression mainly used on the Eastern Seaboard, and seldom, if ever heard in cities like Chicago or Philadelphia or Detroit. <br /> <br /> Although Valachi had seemingly never intended to disclose what he eventually did, planning to tell only enough to get revenge against Genovese, as he talked to agents of the FBI, his frustrations and resentments over perceived slights and lack of recognition for his many years of service, by his various bosses over the years, finally pushed him into disclosing everything he knew, or almost everything, about Cosa Nostra.<br /> <br /> A foot soldier and therefore limited in his scale of knowledge, he knew enough however, to give his friends in the mob plenty of heartburn. It is fascinating to imagine being a fly on the wall in Genovese’s cell when Joe’s revelations were broadcast. How the mighty Don would have coped with his peers had he been released just then, is interesting to contemplate. According to author Nick Tosches, Vito ‘was the most violent, most grasping and most treacherous of his breed.’<br /> <br /> It was not to be of course. Vito Genovese died in the Federal Medical Centre for Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri from heart disease, on St Valentines Day, 1969, before he finished his sentence. Had he lived and served this out, it is almost a certainty that the government would have arranged to deport him back to Italy. He had been denaturalized in 1955 for concealing his criminal record when he applied for citizenship. Up to 1959, he had avoided deportation with a series of legal manoeuvres, but it was almost a given the state would have kicked him out of the country as soon as he was released.<br /> <br /> If all Joe wanted was revenge against the man and the system, he managed to get that, in spades. He lost his job, his lifetime, his wife and son, who left him, and for this he laid the blame square on Genovese.<br /> <br /> ‘Vito Genovese is responsible for everything,’ he told author Peter Maas.<br /> <br /> In 1964 Joe was encouraged by the justice department to put down on paper his life story and his knowledge of the Mafia. The 2190 pages he wrote, are held in 20 folders in two boxes at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.<br /> <br /> Headed:<br /> <br /> ‘The Real Thing: The Expose and Inside Doings of Cosa Nostra,’ they document his life from 1920 until 1964.<br /> <br /> Like his nemesis, he died of a heart attack, at the La Tuna Federal Correctional Institution in Texas, on April 3rd 1971.<br /> <br /> He is buried in a nondescript grave at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery, in Lewiston, Niagara County, in upstate New York. How he came to be here is an interesting side note to his life and death. <br /> <br /> It is generally believed that sometime in the late 1960s he entered into a correspondence with a woman called Marie K. Jackson, a housewife, who lived in Niagara Falls, New York. Abandoned by his wife and son, this relationship was all Valachi had in his final years. When he died, she claimed the body and had it shipped north, at the government’s expense and the body was buried in Lewiston, on or about May 6th. The cemetery sits right on the border of Canada, wedged in between the Niagara River, freeway loops and two massive hydro lakes. Marie Jackson died in 1999 and lies buried next to Joe.<br /> <br /> She had been married at one time, and apparently had children, according to her attorney, Bernard Sax, but details about her are scarce. Originally Marie Murray, she was a Niagara Falls native and attended local schools before taking a job at the Amberg's Men's Shop, where she met her future husband. The marriage was not a happy one apparently, and was annulled by the Catholic Church after three years. He was Jewish and she was Catholic, and their religious differences made the marriage impossible, she later claimed. <br /> <br /> She and Valachi had first begun corresponding when he was incarcerated at the Federal prison in Milan, Michigan, in 1966, and maintained a relationship, by mail; she would write him at least twice a week, until his death. She was apparently attracted to him by his performance at the McClellan hearings, which like millions of Americans, she watched on television. Seemingly, she never physically, visited him in any prison. She filed probate on his will at the Niagara County Surrogate’s Court in Lockport, N.Y. in August 1971. His estate was valued at $30,000, the bulk of it, his share from the Peter Maas autobiography. Most of this however, was escrowed by the U.S. government to meet back-tax obligations; some of the remaining money converted into bonds was sent to Valachi’s ex-wife, Mildred. <br /> <br /> However, Marie claimed in an interview with a reporter from the Buffalo News in 1995 that not long after her marriage broke up, she met Valachi at a house party thrown by a mutual friend in the Falls city. Joe seemingly visited her regularly and paid the rent on her apartment. They met and travelled together often, she claimed, and he took her shopping in New York when she visited him there. None of this information was ever disclosed by Valachi himself. If this is true, it may well explain Joe’s knowledge of the Buffalo Mafia family, information he disclosed at the senate hearings in 1963. His links into the Agueci brothers is perhaps confirmation of his connection into the Mafia family headed by Stefano Maggadino.<br /> <br /> Nelson Silva Cantellops, on his release from prison, disappeared into obscurity, emerging in 1965, dead on a bar-room floor, the result of a bad meeting with someone’s knife. His killer was never apprehended.<br /> <br /> It’s interesting that although he was the main instrument in the government’s fight to indict and imprison a man considered perhaps the biggest criminal in America at the time, there does not appear to be a single photographic image of him, anywhere, and the details of his life after the Genovese case, and his death, do not seem to have been recorded in any detail. The short, chubby Puerto Rican criminal, wanders through this story as almost a will-o'-the-wisp, a flickering light, always receding, whenever the search is on.<br /> <br /> Like Dick Datchery in Charles Dickens’ last and unfinished novel, ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood,’ Nelson comes and goes in the story of Vito Genovese’s drug bust, as not only a conundrum, but seemingly a lost and forgotten figure in the history of organized crime. A few, yellowing pages in a long disused case file, lying in a dusty corner of an archive room somewhere, he lives on only in the memory of those of us searching for the Holy Grail of Mob lore: <br /> <br /> The perfect certainty, the Gospel according to St. Paul-the truth; or maybe to St. Rita-the saint of the impossible; or most probably, St. Jude-the saint of hopeless cases.<br /> </p>
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Dead Men On Leave: The Mafia Murder of Carlo Tresca
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/dead-men-on-leave
2010-11-18T11:30:00.000Z
2010-11-18T11:30:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> The man with the heavy black beard had left his comfortable, six-room apartment at 130 West Twelfth Street. It was late in the morning, and he had to go to his office; but first he had a lunch meeting.<br /> <br /> It was January 11th, 1943.<br /> <br /> There were four of them gathering late on this morning, and they went to eat at one of his favourite restaurants- John’s- also on Twelfth Street, a few blocks east from where he lived. Opened in 1908, it still to this day serves traditional northern Italian cuisine in an atmosphere largely unchanged over generations: dim lighting, old wooden booths, tiled floors and a giant candle centre piece that has been building up wax for over seventy years.<br /> <br /> The restaurant had been founded by John Puciatti, an immigrant from Umbria, and soon became a favourite meeting venue for New York’s Italia-American souvveusivi -subversives.<br /> <br /> Until 1940, its adverts carried a phrase: ‘A place for all radicals.’<br /> <br /> The man often ate here, sometimes lunching with the owner upstairs in his private apartment.<br /> <br /> An iconic landmark in this part of the city, twenty years before, it had been the scene of a crucial gang-war confrontation.<br /> <br /> In August 1922, Umberto Valenti, fighting for control of New York’s Italian-American underworld, was murdered near John’s. Called to a peace conference with Giuseppe Masseria, another mob boss, to be held in the restaurant, Valenti, ambushed by a group of gunmen at 11:45 am, was chased down to the corner of 2nd Avenue and then, shot dead as he tried to escape in a taxi.<br /> <br /> The portly man sat next to his old friend, John Dos Passos, the author, social historian and radical critic of the quality of American life. Across the table, sat Margaret De Silver, the woman the man had lived with since 1931. They had relocated to the Manhattan from Brooklyn Heights in 1939 or 1940. With them was her son- 27 year old Harrison. Although his doctor had been urging him to lose weight, to help overcome the various health problems he suffered from, the big, bearded man- Carlo Tresca- ate with a formidable appetite, enjoying a meal of veal scaloppini, spaghetti and cheese, all washed down with red wine and coffee.<br /> <br /> The lunch was long and noisy. The restaurant owner remembered how the company at the table almost vibrated with the noise and excitement of their excited conversations. They were discussing the war in Europe and the inevitability of Benito Mussolini’s collapse in Italy. The man who was the heart of the most intense discussions, was Tresca himself, and he reiterated how committed he was to making sure that the vacuum created by the Italian dictator’s fall, would not be filled by the communists.<br /> <br /> He was an old time revolutionary, and once had in fact supported the communists-seeing them as valuable allies in the fight against fascism. However, when the Stalinists crushed the anarchist movement in Catalonia and Aragon, during the Spanish Civil War, Tresca became an implacable enemy of Stalinism.<br /> <br /> Sometime during the meal, an old friend, Luigi Antonini, stopped by to speak. The head of Local 89 of The International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which had 34000 members, he was one of the foundling members of the American Labour Party, created in the summer of 1936 to provide support for the re-election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.<br /> <br /> Since at least 1908, Carlo Tresca the elder statesman of the Italian-American radical world had been closely involved in the struggles of the American worker. In Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Massachusetts he had actively campaigned in the mainstream of American extremism and labour disputes, and he had many friends, and enemies among the thousands of workers and hundreds of officials who formed the core of the New York labour movements.<br /> <br /> The lunch lasted for several hours and, it was late in the afternoon, when Tresca left his party then walked the three blocks north, to his office. He ran a newspaper called Il Martello, (The Hammer), which he had used since 1920 as a propaganda tool against Mussolini. His office was located on a floor of a building at 96, Fifth Avenue, on the corner of Fifteenth Street, in lower Manhattan.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:left;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236992457,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Carlo Tresca (photo left) was sixty-four years of age. A hulking, overweight man, with a distinct mass of black hair, he also sported a beard and full, flowing moustache. A writer and human rights activist, he had waged a lifelong struggle for social and economic justice and individual rights. Born in 1879, in Sulmona in the province of Abruzzi, Italy, he had from an early age, embraced socialism and developed a powerful, belligerent stance in his beliefs that characterised his whole life.<br /> <br /> His political views developed in his early days, in Abruzzi, and by the age of twenty-two, he became elected secretary of The Syndicate of Firemen and Railroad Workers Union, the largest labour organization in Italy; he was also the editor of a newspaper called Il Germe, (The Seed). He was continually in conflict with religious, political and economic figures of power, and in 1904, he had been condemned to two years in prison for creating political agitation. Rather than serve this sentence, he escaped from Italy and travelled via Switzerland to America, arriving in New York on the SS Touraine, in August 1904.<br /> <br /> In the 39 years he lived in America, he published at least four newspaper. His activities in the labour movement brought him into contact with The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) also known as ‘The Wobblies’ and he became closely involved in the New York hotel workers strike (1913), the Paterson, New Jersey silk workers strike (1913) and the Minnesota miners strike (1916). He was constantly under attack by the federal government, and time and time again his newspapers were either suppressed or closed down.<br /> <br /> In 1921 he became interested in the famous Sacco-Vanzetti case, and was responsible for bringing the controversial IWW lawyer, Fred Moore, into the struggle for the defence, and also in generating considerable publicity and financial aid promoting the innocence of the doomed anarchists.<br /> <br /> By the 1920’s, Tresca had become obsessed with the fight against fascism, and was a key activist working against Mussolini’s efforts to organize American-Italians into support groups promoting fascist ideas within America. Pressure by Mussolini’s government eventually persuaded the State Department to suppress Il Martello, and Tresca was imprisoned in 1925 on charges that were so patently false, he was pardoned by President Coolidge after having served only four months of his sentence.<br /> <br /> His tireless advocacy of direct action had led through his life to thirty-six arrests during various working class struggles. <br /> <br /> Unable to eliminate Tresca from the scene of action by legal process, the fascist's tried to stop him forever. He was the recipient of a number of bomb attacks; there were repeated threats on his life, and he once had his throat cut in an unsuccessful assassination attempt. These assaults encouraged antifascist responses among his supporters, and there were several mass demonstrations and street fights, in New York and other leading industrial cities, between the two warring factions. By the end of 1930 Tresca and his supporters, had to all intents effectively derailed Mussolini’s plans for the creation of a subsidiary of his fascist movement in the United States.<br /> <br /> A few hundred yards south of the office Tresca would come to occupy, located on 5th Avenue, and just north of the Little Italy district, was a building at 225 Lafayette Street. Here, once described as a ‘beehive’ of fascist activity, was a concatenation that might come to exert pressure on the events that would take place a few years down the way.<br /> <br /> Edward Corsi, a notorious fascist sympathizer, founded an Italian weekly magazine called La Settimana, and moved his office here in 1936. Files in the New York District Attorney’s Office indicate that he attended a meeting in which the murder of Carlo Tresca was discussed.<br /> <br /> Vincenzo Martinez, a reporter for Il Progresso, a popular daily Italian newspaper owned by millionaire businessman Generso Pope, was allegedly part of the New York Mafia. He also acted as secretary of the Macaroni Employers Association, whose office was based in the building. In addition he was close to a man called Frank Garofalo, a powerful mob boss allied to what we now know to-day as the Bonanno Crime Family. Martinez was also a confidant of a young, tough gangster called Carmine Galante, who was making a mark for himself in and around the same crime family<br /> <br /> Garofalo often dined in a restaurant on the top floor of the building, sometimes holding meetings here with Pope, for whom he worked in at least one capacity.<br /> <br /> The building also housed at various times an assortment of men, all linked into the New York underworld.<br /> <br /> The Five Borough Truckmen’s Service Association had their office in the building. It was a group of hoods headed by Dominick Didato, Johnny Diougiardi, and his uncle Jimmy Plumeri. They were all part of another New York Mafia crime family then run by Tomasso Gagliano. As extra muscle in enforcing their demands on independent truckers in the city, they used a hoodlum called Natale Evola, someone else who would have known Garofalo, and who in fact one day in the distant future would himself, come to lead the Bonanno’s for a brief period.<br /> <br /> Albert Marinelli, the county clerk of Manhattan and leader of the 2nd Assembly also had an office in this building. Some sources claim he was the most powerful leader in Tammany Hall. He was also linked into one of the most extensive mob combinations then operating in the New York area, in the early 1930s consisting of Vito Genovese, Charley Luciano, Johnny Torio, Vincenzo Mangano, Anthony Strollo, Joe ’Socks’ Lanza and Ciro Terranova. It was suggested he often met with Garofalo and Galante and there was a strong possibility that he was mixed up not only in the politics of the mob but also the murky, shifting-sands of Soviet espionage and intrigue rampant in New York in the late 1930s.<br /> <br /> Thomas Dewey, the crusading district attorney, referred to him as:<br /> <br /> ‘…..a political ally of thieves, pickpockets, thugs, dope peddlers and big-shot racketeers.’<br /> <br /> Luciano went to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1932 with him as his guest, sharing a suite at the Drake Hotel with the crooked assemblyman.<br /> <br /> In the 1930s, Tresca fell in and then out of love with the communist movement. Their devastating brutality in the Spanish Civil War turned him into an implacable foe. By the end of the decade, the communists were conducting a strategy of character assassination against Tresca in the hopes of mitigating and destroying his influence in the anti-fascist movements. Tresca's political views became increasingly more radical over the years, and he soon came to identify himself as an anarchist.<br /> <br /> In its simplistic form, anarchy is a culture of free individuals, combining all social and economic activities, unencumbered by any form of ruling authority. The term first came into common practice in 1840, adopted by a Frenchman, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in an essay he wrote called What is Property? Although closer to communism in terms of its doctrine, anarchy is diametrically opposed to fascism and its extreme right-wing authoritarian principles. <br /> <br /> By the time Tresca arrived in the United States, the federal government had already enacted the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 and President William McKinley had been assassinated by Leon Czologosz, a radical anarchist. Mario Buda, an Italian anarchist, would be responsible for the massive Wall Street bombing in September 1920. America was finding out just how committed political activists could be, when often, all they had to look forward to were their dreams.<br /> <br /> As 1943 dawned, Carlo Tresca had become a thorn in the side of many people and organizations. The N.Y.P.D. had long listed him as a terrorist. He had a lot of enemies. Historical records indicate for example, that Mussolini had put Tresca’s name on a death list as early as 1931. He was at war with the communists and the fascists, as well as the unions and employers. There were probably enough names to fill a telephone directory. He knew that he lived on the cusp of a perilous mountain of intrigue and danger. He could easily have been the subject of the statement of German leftist Eugene Levine, who at his trial said: ‘We revolutionaries are all dead men on leave.’<br /> <br /> Earlier in the year, Tresca had lunched at John’s with two of his associates, Vincenzo Lionetti and Ezio Taddei. They had tried to persuade him to accompany them to Boston to attend a rally.<br /> <br /> ‘I will come,’ he said: ‘if they do not kill me first.’<br /> <br /> They did.<br /> <br /> At his third floor office he met up with a number of visitors, and then waited for a meeting that was to assemble at eight-thirty that evening.<br /> <br /> He sat there, with Giuseppe Calabi, an attorney and exile from Italy, waiting for four other men, who along with Tresca and Calabi had been recently chosen by the New York chapter of the Mazzini Society to establish an expanded committee for anti-fascist campaigning.<br /> <br /> The society, the most influential anti-fascist organization in America, had been founded in 1939 by Count Carlo Sforza and Max Ascoli in New York and had established over 40 branches across the country within excess of 1000 members.<br /> <br /> The four others to whom Tresca had written, inviting them to meet him in his office, were Vanni Montana, secretary to Luigi Antonini, president of the Italian-American Labor Council; John Sala, an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America along with Giovanni Profenna and Gian Mario Lanzilotti. However they did not appear. No word came from them, and phone calls by the editor failed to locate any of them.<br /> <br /> At nine-thirty, Tresca decided they would wait no longer, and suggested that he and Calabi both go to a nearby bar for sandwiches and a drink. It was situated diagonally across Fifth Avenue from Tresca’s office building. The two men exited by a door on Fifteenth Street and arm in arm, walked over to the north-east corner, stopping, before crossing the avenue.<br /> <br /> The streets of New York were dark. All the lights were either switched off or dimmed under the war time emergency regulations. It was gloomy on this corner as the two men stopped under a street lamp, next to the trash can. It was now nine-forty five.<br /> <br /> A figure moved out of the darkness, down Fifth Avenue, towards the men. He was holding a .32 calibre semi-automatic pistol. Suddenly the blackness of the night was<br /> <br /> illuminated by streaks of blue light. Shots rang out, first one, then three more. At the sound of the first discharge, Tresca turned towards the gunman, and then, his body jerked with the impact of the bullets, and he stiff-legged backwards off the sidewalk onto the roadway. As he collapsed onto the ground, his friend, Calabi, leaned in towards him, trying to support his falling body. He saw the killer, a small man, barely five feet four inches in height. His face was pale, with regular features, partially hidden by a fedora, pulled low over the forehead. Long overcoat, dark clothes, slender build, moving fast.<br /> <br /> The killer turned, and ran south across Fifteenth Street towards a car that was already pulling away from the curb. He ran with the ease of an athlete, taking long steps, jumping into the opened door at the rear of the vehicle. It accelerated and sped through the gloom, west towards Chelsea, and then like a wraith, was gone.<br /> <br /> Samuel Sherman who owned a clothing store at 100 Fifth Avenue also heard the shots and called the police. By the time they and an ambulance from Saint Vincent’s Hospital arrived, Tresca was dead. One shot had blasted into his left side, from the back, scorching through his dark Burberry overcoat and tearing through his lung; the other, hit him on the right side of the face as his body swung under the impact of the first shot. This second round passed through his brain, stopping at the base of his skull. There were powder burns on the skin, and his broad-brimmed black hat was bloodstained across the brim and crown. The killer had come within inches of his target to shoot him dead.<br /> <br /> As the killer disappeared, Calabi had called out for help. A cab stopped, and people gathered on the sidewalk to stare at the body sprawled in the gutter.</p>
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<p><br /> <br /> A newspaper photograph of the scene shows Carlo Tresca sprawled on his back. His feet are touching the curb and his chin is pointing towards the sky. His left arm is tucked into his body, under his dark overcoat, and his right hand lies relaxed across his chest. Beneath his head, blood forms a widening pool across the black asphalt of Fifth Avenue. His hat and ubiquitous pipe lay near him.<br /> <br /> There were other witnesses to the murder. A teacher, Rosco Platts, heard the gunfire and saw the group of three men under the lamppost. His description of the gunman closely matched that of Guiseppe Calabi.<br /> <br /> Two men employed by the Norwegian consulate, were walking east on Fifteenth Street and heard the shots. One of them, Mentz Von Erpecom, later described the car. He had served in the Automobile Corps of the Norwegian army, and he knew his motors:<br /> <br /> ‘I judge by the sound of the engine,’ he said, ‘I am absolutely sure it was a Ford. As to the year, I think a ’38 or ’39. It was a dark Ford sedan.’<br /> <br /> Tony Ribarich, a close friend of Tresca’s, later told the police that he and his friend had been walking, two days earlier, past the New School for Social Research on West 12th Street, near 6th Avenue when they were almost run over by a similar Ford.<br /> <br /> Tresca had changed his routine this evening, which may well have cost him his life. If he worked late, he generally had the support of one or two bodyguards: Vincenzo Lionetti a longshoreman, and Tony Ribarchi, another tough guy, although a tailor by trade. Neither men were present. Presumably had everyone attended the meeting, Tresca would have felt safe in the numbers around him.<br /> <br /> After an autopsy had been carried out, Tresca was removed to The Campbell Funeral Parlor on Madison Avenue. Two hundred people tried to cram in to view the body, before the doors were closed.<br /> <br /> On January 16th, Tresca’s corpse, dressed in a dark suit and enclosed by a grey, metal casket, was moved to Manhattan Centre on Eighth Avenue. By noon, 5000 people had filed past the open coffin. Fifteen speakers eulogised the dead man, all claiming that the murder was an act of political assassination.<br /> <br /> At 2.30 in the afternoon, a cavalcade of 75 cars carrying friends and family, 15 carrying floral tributes, and 10 more, police and reporters, followed Tresca’s body as it was carried across the Williamsburg Bridge to Fresh Ponds Cemetery located in the borough of Queens, where he would be cremated. As the funeral procession made its way through Manhattan, 500 people gathered in silence on the corner of Fifteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, to mourn at a shrine of 500 red carnations.<br /> <br /> The funeral and burial left everyone wondering the same question:<br /> <br /> Who killed Carlo Tresca, and why?<br /> <br /> The man who became the prime suspect was a small-time hoodlum from Brooklyn. Although he was arrested, detained and questioned, off and on for three years, the police were unable to gather enough evidence to indict him. The murder of Carlo Tresca has never been solved, and in due course his life and death were consigned to the history books. His murder may have resulted from political pressure originating from Italy; the result of a conspiracy involving either the Communist or Fascist Parties; an overt act against a known enemy by the Russian secret service or then again, it may have simply been the consequence of one man doing another a favour.<br /> <br /> As author Eric Ambler has it in his novel ‘A Coffin For Dimitrios,’ in these affairs what counts is not who pulls the trigger, but who pays for the bullet.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:left;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236993276,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />The man who undoubtedly killed him however, was to become one of the most notable figures in a criminal group that has operated in New York, and beyond, for over eighty years. On that dark, miserable January night when he gunned down his target, the probable killer, Carmine Galante (photo left), was already associated with or indeed perhaps a member of a Mafia organization that to-day is known as the Bonanno Crime Family.<br /> <br /> Link: Death in the afternoon. The shadow of a dream. The story of Carmine Galante<br /> <br /> Joe Bonanno the family head, used the wealth he had accumulated during Prohibition to help fund his way into legitimate businesses. In time he became a partner or whole<br /> <br /> owner of a wide range of interests: clothing factories, laundries, a funeral home, and one of the most extensive- the Grande Cheese Company of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. He kept these business ventures clean and tidy, paying his taxes on time like any respectable citizen. He also operated on the other side of the law, running the Italian lottery, operating gambling and ‘numbers’ ventures, and no doubt generating cash through loan-sharking, always a speciality of the mob. He based himself, initially in a social club called the Abraham Lincoln Independent Political Club on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.<br /> <br /> The years that followed Prohibition were productive and relatively peaceful among the five rival families, as they manoeuvred around each other, competing for a bigger slice of the Big Apple. Joseph Bonanno claimed that the first thirty years were the balmy days and that until the mid-1950s he was hardly known to the press, and that likewise other members of his crime family generated no publicity.<br /> <br /> Then there was the murder of Carlo Tresca in 1943.<br /> <br /> Almost fourty years later, General Alberto Dalla Chiesa, carabinieri officer and newly appointed prefect of Palermo, reminisced shortly before his own murder at the hands of the Mafia, on the template for what came to be know as excellent cadavers-the illustrious servants of the state killed by the secret society:<br /> <br /> …..‘the powerful man is killed when factors come together to make a fatal combination-when he becomes too dangerous but can be killed because he’s become isolated.’<br /> <br /> The killing was investigated by the Manhattan District Attorney who appointed ADA Jacob Gramet to oversee the case handling. He was in turn assisted by six assistant district attorneys, and addition six special investigators headed a task-force supported by thirteen police officers under the direction of Deputy Chief Inspector Conrad Rothengast. Alongside them, worked ten detectives from the Grand Jury Squad, and added to this, were specialist assigned from the Alien Squad, the Police Technical Research Unit, the Manhattan and State Department of Corrections, the State Police Commission, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and officers from the Special Investigation Bureau of the U.S. Alcohol Tax Unit. A veritable army of gumshoes.<br /> <br /> Interestingly, the F.B.I. sat in the wings, watching the developments unfold. At this point in its history, the agency was not too bothered about mobsters. It was interested in Tresca’s murder, more for its political undertones, particularly in connection with any possible communist involvement than anything else<br /> <br /> Their main file on Tresca must have been immense because the collateral documents alone run to 1500 pages. In their generosity and benevolence, they sent DA Frank<br /> <br /> Hogan a twelve page summary that in their wisdom they deemed,’ this is all the information in the Bureau’s files which it is believed may be of value to the New York authorities in possibly solving the Tresca murder.’<br /> <br /> Late in the evening of Tuesday January 12th, at 10:30 pm, the police picked up Carmine Galante as he waited on the corner of Elizabeth and Prince Streets in Manhattan’s Bowery district. He had just left a candy store, fronting as a gambling club, and was in the company of Joseph De Palermo, alias ‘Joe Beck,’ a notorious criminal, and a man who would have a life-long involvement in drug trafficking for the mob. Galante became an primary suspect in the murder investigation because of events that had occurred the previous evening.<br /> <br /> Galante had gone to prison on a twelve year stretch for the armed robbery of a Brooklyn brewery. He was currently out on parole, and had to attend his parole office on a regular basis. This was situated at 80 Centre Street. It was common practice for parole officers to follow their parolees in the hope of catching them consorting with known criminals. Galante, after checking with his parole officer, Sydney Fross at 8:15pm in the evening of January 11th, was followed to a car that picked him up. The two parole officers tracking him, Fred Berson and George Talianoff, could not continue the chase by vehicle, because of restrictions placed on such activity by the wartime gas shortages.<br /> <br /> They did however, take down a description of the auto- it was a black, 1938 Ford sedan- its registration plate number was IC-9272. This car had been found abandoned about five blocks from the murder scene at West Eighteenth Street, near the Seventh Avenue subway station, by Patrolman Dave Greenberg in the early hours of January 12th. The police were able to trace through the ignition keys that the car had been stored in an eight-vehicle sized garage, leased to one Frank Nuncio, at 265 Elizabeth Street, less than a block from where the parole officers witnessed the pick-up of Galante, an hour or so before the murder occurred.<br /> <br /> Nuncio, 24 years old, was arrested in the first week of September by detectives of the Tenth squad, and held on $25,000 bail at The House of Detention in The Bronx. A<br /> <br /> small-time bootlegger with a number of arrests, he was not a big league criminal. According to the records, the police held on to him as long as they could because he was their only direct link to Galante, but eventually, after two months, they had to release him for lack of evidence.<br /> <br /> Galante was remanded by the police for violating his parole conditions, and consorting with a known criminal- Palermo. Questioned off and on for several months, he always denied any knowledge of the crime. He claimed the night of January 11th after seeing his parole officer, he had taken the IRT uptown and gone to see the movie, Casablanca, at the Hollywood Theatre on Broadway. He confirmed that he went there with his girlfriend, but refused to give up her name, not wanting to get her into any trouble. She turned out to be Helen Marulli, the woman he would eventually marry.<br /> <br /> Incarcerated in the massive granite edifice on Centre Street called the Hall of Justice, but usually referred to as the Tombs prison, he was identified in a line up by Guiseppe Calabi, as the man who shot Carlo Tresca. In order to try and prise information out of Galante, the police used an informant called Emilio Funicello, a two-time loser serving a life sentence. A low-level member of the mob, his wife had died while he was in prison, and he blamed his former associates for failing to provide her with medical care. He wanted his freedom to take care of his children, and had been used before by the police as a contact or informant to help break difficult cases.<br /> <br /> Funicello eventually was able to gain Galante’s confidence, and at different times, heard versions of what happened that night. In one, Galante referred to the car driver as ‘Buster‘ and another man in the car he called ‘Pap’ or ‘Pep’ They went for a meal that night to a bar and grill on Fifth Avenue, between Fifteenth and Sixteenth streets.<br /> <br /> In another account, he said that he met Helen Marulli at the Hollywood Theatre, leaving her there to see the movie, while he had gone to meet ‘Buster’ and ‘Pap’ and driven with them down to Fourteenth Street. There, ‘Pap‘ had left the car and gone to stand in the doorway to Tresca’s building, on the Fifth Avenue side. Galante and ‘Buster‘ had then driven around to park the car in Fifteenth Street.<br /> <br /> Galante went after the two men as they left the building. According to Funicello’s statement, Galante said to him: ‘I let him have the first shot in the right side of the head. It looked like I didn’t hit him because he kept on walking. I let him have another….His little friend there……..He was looking at me, but he looked like he was in a daze because he didn’t move……I ran after the car and jumped in. I saw ‘Pap’ standing on the corner. I got out at Sixteenth Street, went uptown.’ There, he went to the theatre, picked up his girlfriend and went with her to a hotel where they spent the night.<br /> <br /> ‘Pap‘ apparently dropped his gun, a .38 police positive revolver near the Fifth Street entrance to the building. Patrolman Charles Clarke found it hidden here behind some trash barrels. There were no fingerprints on it and it was untraceable. The police were also unable to trace ownership of the getaway car, which had been purchased weeks before in the New York car lot of Con-Fed Motors by a man who gave his name as Charles Pappas. Both the name and address turned out to be bogus. Although ‘Pap‘ was never identified, the New York police were convinced that the driver ‘Buster‘ was in fact Bastiano Domingo who had been one of the ushers at Joseph Bonanno’s wedding in 1931.<br /> <br /> Whoever it was, it could not have been this Buster. He’d been shot dead on the evening of May 30, 1933, in a cafe on First Street, Manhattan. (1)<br /> <br /> Following Galante's arrest, informants told investigators that a collection had been taken up to pay his legal expenses. Shopkeepers in and around Prince and Mulberry Streets where Galante operated, had been encouraged to contribute and remarkably few refused. The man who apparently organized this was Frank Citrano, alias ‘Chuck Wilson’ a man known to have ‘powerful pull’ with New York leaders and judges. Interestingly enough, he also had a son, called ‘Buster.’ <br /> <br /> Citrano pops up again in files in the New York District Attorney’s Office. These indicate that the American Labour Party, which Luigi Antonini helped to establish,<br /> <br /> contributed funds for Galante’s defence. Memos on file throughout 1944 also reveal that Citrano, Tony Garappa, Galante, and the Palermo brothers- Joe and Peter- were paid $9000 for Tresca’s killing, the money passed over to them by Tony Parisi, a member of the Teamsters Local 27.<br /> <br /> It was believed that DA Hogan would present the case to a grand jury in May, but this never eventuated. Galante was jailed for almost a year on violations of parole charges, and then released in December 1944 with no additional charges laid against him. If Galante was the shooter- and it seems certain he was, documents released under the F.O.I. Act establish the N.Y.P.D., F.B.I. and the Manhattan’s D.A. Office had quickly concluded Galante shot Tresca- what was less obvious was who was behind the killing?<br /> <br /> In the months immediately following the murder, there was much speculation as to the reason for Tresca’s murder.<br /> <br /> Ezio Taddei, who had lunched at John’s earlier in the year with Tresca, made a statement to the police the day after the killing. He said: ‘My conviction is the Communist Party killed Carlo Tresca……they are trying to get control of The Mazzini Society……I am convinced the murder was politically inspired, nothing more.’<br /> <br /> Luigi Antonini, the union official who had spoken with Tresca at that last lunchtime meal, also implied that the Communist Party was behind the killing. In turn, the Communist’s countered with allegations that an agent of the Italian Secret Service was behind the crime. They covered themselves with a two-way bet when Benjamin Gitlow, secretary-general of the party, claimed that Tresca was murdered as a result of conflict between himself and Enea Ormenti, aka Vittorio Vidali, an agent of the OGPU (Russian Secret Service) later absorbed into the NKVD. Their dispute stemmed, apparently, from the murder of one of Tresca’s closest friends, killed in Spain during the Civil War in 1937- Italian anarchist writer Camillo Berneri- and the possible abduction and murder also in 1937 of Juliet Stuart Poyntz, a well known Communist agitator and intellectual, who disappeared while walking in Central Park,<br /> <br /> one night in June, However the secret agent Ormenti , had an air-tight alibi for the night Tresca was shot. He was seen attending a banquet in Mexico City.<br /> <br /> Another story that surfaced lay the responsibility for the murder at the door of Vito Genovese. The under boss of the Mafia crime family headed by Charlie Luciano. Genovese had fled to Italy in 1937 to avoid prosecution on a murder charge. In 1957 the F.B.I. received an anonymous letter stating that Genovese had become extremely close to Benito Mussolini. He had developed strong ties to the Fascist Party, and had arranged the killing of Tresca as a personal favour for the Italian dictator, after being approached by senior members of the group who were deeply concerned about the damage Tresca could do to them in New York..<br /> <br /> Ed Reid, the reporter and crime writer, was the first to advance this theory in his articles in the now defunct Brooklyn Eagle newspaper and the New York Post.<br /> <br /> Tresca and Genovese had crossed swords seven years earlier according to Nino Mirabini, one time chauffeur and bodyguard to Genovese. In a statement made in 1946, he claimed Carlo Tresca had stirred up a hornets nest on discovering Genovese was opening a Fascist club for Italian sailors in Manhattan. It was it seems, to be merely a cover for Genovese’s burgeoning drug trafficking organization. The plan never went ahead, and a year later Genovese fled New York while under suspicion for being involved in the murder of minor mob figure Ferdinand Boccia.<br /> <br /> Louis A. Pagnucco, the assistant district attorney in charge of the Italian side of the Tresca investigation, interviewed an underworld character called Ernest ‘The Hawk‘ Ruppolo, in 1946. He claimed that the murder had been organized by Anthony Bender, aka ‘Tony Strollo‘ and Mike Miranda two captains in the Luciano crime family, and that Galante was accompanied that night by Gus Frasca and George Smurra.<br /> <br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">Link:</span> <a style="font-weight:bold;" href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/being-ernest-the-life-and-hard">The Life and Hard Times of Ernie 'The Hawk' Rupolo</a><br /> <br /> In 1963 a U.S. Senate subcommittee on organized crime, heard testimony from Deputy Chief Inspector John J. Shanley of the New York Police Department, confirming that the Tresca killing had been organized by Strollo and Miranda acting on behalf of Vito Genovese.<br /> <br /> A compelling, if true, allegation by author Dorothy Gallagher, is that two of the most notorious and extreme Stalinists in the history of American Communism, waterfront labour thug Frederick N. (Blackie) Myers, an official of the National Maritime Union (NMU), and Soviet spy Louis Goldblatt, an officer of the West Coast dockworkers' union movement controlled by Harry Bridges of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) were questionably close to Galante on the night of the murder. They were allegedly reported visiting the parole office of Sydney Fross at 80 Centre Street at the same time Galante was checking in.<br /> <br /> Myers and Goldblatt were part of unions that employed extensive violence against their political adversaries, including supporters of anarchy-syndicalism such as Carlo Tresca. They would also have had strong ties with the unions represented by the two men who did not turn up that night for the meeting with Tresca-Montana and Sala.<br /> <br /> Was there somehow, some connection through this? How for example, did the killer of Tresca know exactly where he would be that night, at around that time?<br /> <br /> Another predication generated was that Albert Marinelli, the crooked assemblyman from the 2nd District had also been involved in a Soviet espionage and terror campaign in the U.S. For years after the killing of Tresca, Italian-American anarchists and anti-Stalinist Socialists declared that the Communists had worked out a quid pro quo with the Mafia in New York: the former agreeing to mob rule over certain unions while the latter would ‘rub out’ certain political enemies of Moscow.<br /> <br /> There was another person, a man who passed through the last day of Carlo Tresca’s life; a man who perhaps also had a reason to shut down the activities of the radical anarchist.<br /> <br /> In a report sent to J. Edgar Hoover, on February 5th, 1943 by Special Agent E.E. Conroy, was information that the nexus connecting Carlo Tresca, Frank Garofalo and Generso Pope was perhaps complemented by the inclusion of Luigi Antonini forming an alliance with Pope. This had come about through a deal brokered by Garofalo to legitimize Pope and help him win a seat on the Italian-American Victory Council. This had been set up to determine the coordination on the establishment of a post-Fascist government in Italy following an Allied victory in Europe. It was based initially in Washington D.C. under the authority of The War Office of Information. Carlo Tresca was vehemently against the inclusion of communists and their sympathisers in this organization.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236993295,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Pope had secretly been contributing funds to an ILWU hospital being built in Los Angeles. 18 months later a Bureau report confirmed that ‘the only thing that kept Luigi Antonini from publicly joining faces with Generso Pope was Carlo Tresca and once he was out of the picture, there would be no one to impede his move.’<br /> <br /> However, the man who rates as the most logical suspect behind the elimination of Carlo Tresca was the under boss of the Bonanno Mafia crime family.<br /> <br /> In 1943, Frank Garofalo (photo right) was 52 years old. The son of a leather worker, he was born, like so many of the main characters who populate this story, in Castellammare del Golfo. Apart from anything else, he had an endlessly confusing surname, being referred to as Garofalo, Garafola, Garafalo and Garofolo, as well as using the name Frank Carrol just to confuse the issue even more.<br /> <br /> He came to America in 1910 and was naturalised in 1930. A single man, he lived at 339 East Fifty-eight Street, in Manhattan. He was a wholesale distributor of cheese, with an office at 176 Avenue A, and had a police permit to carry a gun. Joseph Bonanno refers to him as an urbane and sophisticated man, fond of opera, good food and lively conversation. He had an particularly strong grasp of the English language (something which evaded Bonanno all his life) and as a result, Joe came to rely upon<br /> <br /> him heavily in serious negotiation situations. He also called Garofalo, ‘my right hand man.’ According to some sources, he acted as Bonanno’s second-in-charge for over 25 years. He may also have been instrumental in helping the crime family establish a bridgehead in Montreal, through which they would come to ship heroin, imported by sea from Sicily. Although of average height and build, Don Ciccio as Garofalo was also known, inspired much fear in people.<br /> <br /> In an inter office F.B.I. memorandum from D.M. Ladd to J. Edgar Hoover dated February 1, 1946, it states: ‘Frank Garafalo is the head of a large syndicate known as the Castallammarese gang of which Frank Nuccio is a member. Garafalo is reputed to be a big-time racketeer in New York City who allegedly is in control of the Italian section of the New York underworld…….he is thought to be criminally dangerous.’<br /> <br /> Apart from spelling his name and the gang’s name wrong, wrongly identify him as the head of the Bonanno family, and the man who controlled all the Mafia families in the city, Mr. Ladd hit it right on the button.<br /> <br /> Frank Garofalo went back and forth between New York and Italy several times during the 1930s- in 1929, 1932, 1937 and 1938 at least. No one knows for sure why he made these journeys. He had legitimate business interests and was a key player in the importation and distribution of Italian cheeses into the United States. Joe Bonanno also apparently made frequent visits back to his homeland, although history only seemingly records his famous travels in 1957, which he claimed was a holiday funded by Generso Pope. The two men were also close to Santo Sorge, a powerful business man in New York with major ties into the Mafia in Sicily, and Gaetano Russo who headed up the famous Cusimano and Russo Funeral Home in Brooklyn. Although ostensibly a well-known and respected member of the business community, he apparently had links to just about every key Mafia figure in the country and according to the Federal Bureau of Narcotic set up a substantial drug trafficking arrangement with Charley Luciano in 1955.<br /> <br /> Why would Frank Garofalo, one of the most powerful mob bosses in New York want to see Carlo Tresca dead? There were two reasons. One was called Generoso Pope (photo below) and the other Dolores C. Faconti.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236993870,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Generoso Pope (right), born of peasant stock and originally carrying the name Pappa, in Beneveto, Italy in 1891, emigrated to America in 1906. His life was the stuff of immigrant’s dreams. Starting work as a labourer, he eventually became owner of Colonial Sand and Stone, the biggest construction company in America. He was the first Italian-American multi-millionaire. He owned and published two prominent Italian language daily newspapers and became America’s most prominent pro-fascist. He spearheaded numerous fund-raising drives in support of Mussolini. One of his sons, Fortuna, published Il Progresso, the largest circulation Italian language newspaper in America. His other son, Generoso junior, one day would publish The National Enquirer, funded initially with financial support from Frank Costello, one of New York’s leading underworld figures.<br /> <br /> On February 14th, 1943, at a commemorative rally honouring Tresca, Ezio Taddei changed direction away from the Communist Party and accused individuals in the underworld of Tresca’s murder. He also introduced Pope as a key player in the conspiracy. In a pamphlet put out by Taddei called “The Tresca Case,” he described the relationship between Garofalo, Galante and Pope.<br /> <br /> Famous columnist, Walter Winchell inferred in one of his Daily Mirror articles that ‘another publisher arranged the assassination through his bodyguard.’<br /> <br /> Taddei also drew attention to Miss Dolores Faconti Assistant US Attorney in the Southern Division of New York, who he implied was Garofalo’s girlfriend.<br /> <br /> Frank Garofalo had known Pope for a number of years. Some sources claimed that the two were ‘joined at the hip’ so close was their relationship. Garofalo operated a newspaper agency business that distributed Il Progresso throughout New York, and allegedly acted as a intermediary for Pope in times of industrial unrest. In 1934 he had visited Tresca, threatening him with violence if he did not stop haranguing Pope.<br /> <br /> Generoso Pope was a leading promoter of Mussolini. He raised $800,000 in support of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, and because of his political power with the Italian vote in New York, he had a lot of influence in the policy of Albany and Washington. Pope’s business and political fortunes depended on his continuing good relations and influence with public officials. The attacks by Tresca were causing him continuing damage.<br /> <br /> Tresca, in one of his articles in Il Martello, wrote, ironically: ‘…….who Generoso Pope is and what gangster methods he employs…..In any case we are ready, either to face the courts, or Pope’s assassins.’<br /> <br /> In 1942 in a public confrontation, Tresca berated Garofalo, not only for his association with Pope, but also his relationship with Dolores Faconti. He criticised the lawyer for associating with ‘that gunman.’<br /> <br /> On September 10th, a dinner was hosted at the Manhattan Club by the War Bond Savings Committee of Americans of Italian Origin. Assured that Generso Pope would not be attending, Tresca went as a guest. He was infuriated to see Pope seated on the main dais with committee members, but then Garofalo came in accompanied by Dolores Falconti. Disgusted, Tresca rose from his seat shouting ‘Not only is there a Fascist here, but also his gangster. This is too much, I’m leaving!’ He stormed out shouting in a loud voice, accusing Garofalo of being a notorious killer. Tresca subsequently threatened to expose Garofalo in Il Martello and his connection to Pope.<br /> <br /> Garofalo allegedly replied to the effect that before that would happen, Tresca would be found dead in a gutter.<br /> <br /> This outburst by Tresca may well have been the final straw for both Garofalo and Pope. Partly as a result of Tresca’s constant haranguing, the attorney general’s office opened an inquiry on Faconti in 1942, although nothing could be proven against her because of her relationship with Garofalo, and she did not in fact resign her role as an assistant district attorney until 1947.<br /> <br /> Faconti is an crucial link in the chain connecting Tresca’s murder to the man believed to have set up his killer, although there is little known about her. She had graduated from Fordham Law School prior to her time in the DA’s office. By 1949 her relationship with Garofalo had run its course and she married a musical conductor called William Scotti, a prominent saxophone soloist and composer, who led the band at the Cotillion Room in the graceful Pierre Hotel near Central Park.<br /> <br /> Following the angry outburst at the Manhattan Club, Faconti phoned and then visited Tresca, a number of times, begging him not to publicise what had taken place that night, and exposing her relationship with Garofalo. Tresca agreed not to write about Facconte‘s affair with Garofalo, but that he intended to crucify the Mafia leader, and his patron-Generoso Pope. However, when she eventually disclosed this meeting to her lover, he allegedly beat her black and blue for humbling herself to Tresca.<br /> <br /> Garofola was a dangerous man with access to even more dangerous men to do his bidden. Combine this with the almost indissoluble hubris that no doubt was part of his Sicilian personality, and it augured badly for anyone who would cross him, especially in the way Carlo Tresca had done.<br /> <br /> On April 28th, 1950, Generoso Pope died of a stroke. His obituary in the New York Times described him as a ‘colourful and sometimes controversial figure in New York’s business, political and philanthropic life…….an outstanding example of an immigrant who made good in America.’<br /> <br /> His death finally closed the case on Carlo Tresca. By then the F.B.I., New York Police and the District Attorney’s office had more or less given up on the mystery of Tresca’s death. The SAC (Special Agent in Charge) of the New York office of the F.B.I. who followed the developments in the Tresca case closely, in memos to Hoover, speculated that because of the political ramifications, the New York authorities may well have ‘soft pedalled‘ the investigation.<br /> <br /> Carmine Galante and Frank Garofalo continued with their own agendas, and Joseph Bonanno’s life seems not to have been disturbed in the slightest by the Tresca affair, other than that for a while he moved to Arizona as the New York police activity gathered strength and up to 1000 officers were called in to support the investigation.<br /> <br /> If the Bonanno family had been involved in the elimination of such a public figure as Carlo Tresca, it seems inconceivable that it proceeded without authorization from the man who had been leading it now for so many years.<br /> <br /> Carmine Galante carried on being a hot-headed, rambunctious hoodlum, moving up the ranks of the Bonanno crime family, until he became second-in-command to Joe Bonanno. A consummate drug trafficker, Galante was in an out of prison, following his first arrest in 1921, a major suspect in the murder of a police officer in Brooklyn, and a continual target for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Hated and feared by many of his mob contemporaries, his day in the sun, came, literally one hot and sunny afternoon in July 1979. Lunching with two of his associates in a small, family restaurant on Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn, he was shot dead by a group of killers armed with pistols and a shotgun. <br /> <br /> Frank Garofalo eventually moved back to Sicily in 1955 where he lived out the rest of his life in relative obscurity. He apparently returned to America, because on 17th October 1956, a State Trooper patrolling the highway near Binghampton, in northern New York State, at about ten in the evening, stopped a car that was speeding through the town of Windsor. There were four men in it, and the driver produced a license that was clearly not his. It turned out to belong to the front- seat passenger- a man called Joseph Di Palermo, of 246 Elizabeth Street, Manhattan. Trooper Leibe escorted the car to the police substation in Binghampton, where the driver was identified as Carmine Galante.<br /> <br /> Inquires revealed that he and Di Palermo, along with Frank Garofalo and John Bonventre, the other occupants of the car, had spent the previous night, at the Arlington Hotel, as hosts of a local businessman called Joseph Barbara. <br /> <br /> Garofalo also in 1957, most likely attended the infamous November Apalachin mob meeting following his participation as one of the thirty or so Mafioso who had maybe gathered for a conclave that lasted four days in October, at the Grand Hotel des Palmes in Palermo, Sicily.<br /> <br /> Link: Mob Meeting at Apalachin<br /> <br /> On August 2nd, 1965, 74 year old Garofalo was arrested by the Italian police as part of a group of ten, the authorities claimed were an international association linking the Sicilian and American Mafia. The group included some of the most powerful and iconic Sicilian mob figures, such as Frank Coppola, Vincenzo Martinez ( the same one connected into 225 Lafayette Street) Giuseppe Magaddino, Calogero Orlando and Diego Plaja. Some men escaped the net that had spread across Italia from Bologna in<br /> <br /> the north to Taormina on the east coast of Sicily. One of these was Joe Cerito, the 54 year old mob boss of San Jose, in California, who had been observed by the police meeting with Garofalo in Palermo in October 1964.<br /> <br /> The trial of the men in Palermo, for drug trafficking and criminal conspiracy began in 1968, and the Italian authorities wanted Joseph Valachi, the infamous Genovese Family mob informant, to testify as a witness for the prosecution.<br /> <br /> The authorities in America rejected the request, as they were worried about Valachi's security issues. Frank Garofalo never saw the proceedings unfold, as he died of natural causes sometime prior to June 1968 when the case was dismissed by the presiding judge.<br /> <br /> Murder for political expediency is rarely found in the history of the American Mafia. There have been few examples, the most notable perhaps being the assassination of the John F. Kennedy and possibly that of Martin Luther King.<br /> <br /> ‘The Cosa Nostra agreed to 'broker' the assassination of Martin Luther King for an amount somewhat in excess of $300,000 ….... James Earl Ray's contact in New Orleans was with a lieutenant of Carlos Marcello, the Southern Mafia chieftain in New Orleans.’ <br /> <br /> So says a 1968 Justice Department memo that the F.B.I. withheld from the Louis Stokes 1979 congressional investigation into the killings of Dr. King and JFK.<br /> <br /> There was another possible link through the mob boss of Chicago, Sam Giancana, who allegedly used a messenger, Myron Billett, to arrange a meeting in Apalachin, upstate New York, in 1968, between Carlo Gambino, perhaps the biggest American Mafia figure of the time, and three representatives of the CIA, who supposedly offered him $1,000,000 to arrange the killing of King. Gambino apparently turned it down. (2)<br /> <br /> The deaths of these two major public figures may well have been linked by a thread connecting ambitious and ruthless men determined to achieve their own ends, with an organization equipped to supply the manpower and logistical support to carry out overt acts of terrorism that could however, never be directly linked to the originators.<br /> <br /> Not unlike the way the hit had perhaps gone down on Carlo Tresca.<br /> <br /> Dorothy Gallagher, who wrote what may be the definitive biography of Carlo Tresca, called her book: ‘All the Right Enemies.’<br /> <br /> Between Communist sympathisers, fascist radicals, an Italian dictator, political extremists of both left and right wing ideals, big business conspirators, Stalinist sympathizers, a vengeful Italian newspaper magnate and the Force Majeure acting as an overwhelming impetus that effectively blocked any compromise between Tresca as the victim and Pope/Garofalo as the unequivocal instigators, and no doubt indirect perpetrators of his violent death, there was probably never any doubt that at end of day, Carlo Tresca had them in spades. <br /> <br /> A man who spent so much of his life walking around like a bandaged thumb, he perhaps needed to have paid respect to one of Niccolò Machiavelli’s more profound maxims:<br /> <br /> ‘The gulf between how one should live and does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather that self-preservation.’<br /> <br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">Acknowledgement:</span><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><span style="font-weight:bold;">(1) David Critchley. The Origin of Organized Crime in America. Routledge. Taylor & Francis Group. 2009.</span><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><span style="font-weight:bold;">(2) A Letter to the American People (and Myself in Particular) On the Unspeakable.</span><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Copyright James W. Douglas</span><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><span style="font-weight:bold;">I would also like to acknowledge the help of ‘Felice’ from Real Deal who helped me track down some of the Italian end.</span><br /> </p>
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Hit in Harlem: The Life and Times of Eugenio Giannini
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/hit-in-harlem-the-life-and
2010-11-17T14:53:40.000Z
2010-11-17T14:53:40.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> By all accounts he wasn’t that nice a person.<br /> <br /> Described as small, lecherous and ugly, with a temperament to match, it’s hard to find anything redeeming in a life like his, cut short by the mid forties. He played one shady card too many, and found out the hard way that the mob doesn’t tolerate rats or double-crossers. It was only because of Joe Valachi that he made more than just a mention in the New York daily papers: another gangster taken for a one-way ride and dumped in the street. Another sad sack, emptied by the ill fortunes of bad timing and egocentric judgment. It was Joe who let us in on the details of that last night in Harlem, and helped the cops close their case on the body found on 107th Street early on the morning of September 21st, 1952.<br /> <br /> Eugenio (sometimes referred to as Eugene) Giannini was born in 1906 in Bari, Calabria, on the southern tip of the Italian peninsular. His parents immigrated to America, and he grew up in New York. Some sources claim his family settled in the Harlem or Bronx area, others that they laid down roots down in Greenwich Village. For a time as a teenager, he earned his living as a boxer, claiming 13 victories by knockouts. There is no record of just how he drifted into the criminal underworld, but in 1927 in Newport R.I., he served time for robbery, and again in 1928, he was arrested for carrying a revolver and pulled a five to ten year term in Dannemora prison. It was here, that he undoubtedly teamed up with at least one or more of the small group that later formed themselves into a ‘cowboy’ group that cruised the streets of New York looking for potential hold-up targets.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236989690,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Released, he was again arrested in 1934 for armed robbery, but this time it also included a charge of first-degree murder for having shot and killed a police officer during the course of a hold up.<br /> <br /> Giannini (photo right) and his partners had been confronted by the patrolman, and in the ensuring shoot-out, the officer was killed and three people were wounded. Somehow, in the make-believe world of the New York jurisprudence system, charges were dismissed and Giannini went free.<br /> <br /> It’s a given in the Mafia underworld that you don’t kill law enforcement officers. Too much, far too much heat. Giannini was almost certainly not yet linked into that strange, mysterious brotherhood that afternoon when he went to meet his associates.<br /> <br /> The man who would become their main victim, left his home at 40 Pendelton Place, New Brighton, on Staten Island, a curved, tree shaded residential street, probably sometime after lunch, as he was working the four to midnight shift on this day, May 4th 1934. I see him playing with his young sons, then kissing his wife good-bye, forever as it turned out.<br /> <br /> Standing by the door to their small, neat house, watching him stroll down the street towards the sea, maybe she waved to him, one last time. He lived only about a mile and a half from the ferry terminal, so it’s possible he walked the journey. The five cent fare would take him to lower Manhattan in about thirty minutes.<br /> <br /> It was going to be a hot day-temperatures would get up into the 80s by late afternoon in Central Park- perhaps even hotter where he would be working. It could be he stood on the ship’s deck, letting whatever breeze there was cool things down; the wind blowing through his short, dark hair, brushed back from his strong, oblong- shaped Scandinavian type face. As likely as not, he caught a street car from South Ferry Terminal, reaching the precinct building at number nine Oak Street in plenty of time to get ready for his watch.<br /> <br /> Some of the streets he walked no longer exist to-day because of the redevelopments in the area: the new off ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge, and the massive twelve apartment buildings that make up the Governor Alfred E. Smith Housing projects.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236990063,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />That afternoon however, after signing in and getting ready for his shift, he left the station house, walked the short distance to New Chambers Street, turning east to Cherry and then north up Cherry before turning into Oliver, and that’s where it all turned bad.<br /> <br /> Patrolman Arthur P. Rasmussen (right), Badge No. 13779, was 31 years old. An eight year veteran of the New York Police Department, his beat was the teeming, cramped streets and thoroughfares of the old Fourth Ward on the Lower East Side, sometimes referred to as ‘Little Spain.’<br /> <br /> Like police officers the world over, his daily routine would be 97% boring routine, with maybe 3% of sheer terror and chaos kicking in.<br /> <br /> For Arthur Rasmussen, to-day would be a three per center.<br /> <br /> Unknown to him, just a few hundred yards away events were shaping up that would change things forever.<br /> <br /> At 83 Oliver Street, Leonardo and Orizio Mangano were busy serving customers at their grocery store, a few hundred feet north of the Cherry Street intersection. Three men walked into the shop. They were, according to witnesses, almost identical: short, swarthy, with black hair under their fedoras, slim and well-dressed in dark coloured suits The men produced revolvers and demanded money. The two brothers handed over their day’s takings-$147-and although the thieves warned them to stay quiet as they left, Orizio threw a milk bottle through the storefront window, shouting out an alarm.<br /> <br /> The robber’s startled by this, began running away down towards Cherry Street brandishing their guns, clearing a way through the crowded sidewalk..<br /> <br /> Meanwhile Officer Rasmussen continued his beat, actually walking past the robber’s getaway-car, a tan coloured Auburn, parked at the northwest corner of Cherry and New Chambers Street-the driver sitting there- the car engine ticking over as the police officer walked past him.<br /> <br /> As he approached the corner of Oliver Street, Rasmussen heard the noise of people screaming and saw crowds running, scattering across the street and sidewalks. The three men appeared running towards him like crazy, their little legs pumping like pistons looking for a con rod.<br /> <br /> As soon as they saw the blue uniform they started shooting. By the time Officer Rasmussen had cleared his revolver, he had been shot three times- in the jaw, chest and abdomen. He collapsed onto the sidewalk as the robbers leapt over and around him, in their mad rush to their car. Struggling to his knees, the police officer fired his .38 revolver repeatedly after the crooks, until it clicked empty. Due to the street being so crowded, he must have strained to pick his targets without endangering any of the dozens of people milling about.<br /> <br /> Caught in the cross-fire, three civilian victims were injured:<br /> <br /> Ten month old Thomas Farino, the son of another Oak Street officer, who was being taken for a walk by his aunt, Sue Farino, was grazed in the face by a wild shot; Joseph Gaetano, over from Brooklyn for the day, received a wound above his left eye as he was playing ball in the street with some pals. Officer Rasmussen had stopped briefly and taken a friendly swat at the ball with his nightstick. Leonora Albanese, who lived on Cherry Street was with two of her girlfriends. It was her birthday and she had just purchased a cake. The girls were walking three abreast, Leonora in the middle, when she was hit just above the heart. Shots ricocheted off parked cars, and fire escapes and one shattered the window of a barber’s shop.<br /> <br /> Arthur Rasmussen finally collapsed in a heap outside a Greek coffee shop. He was bundled into a taxi by some people in the street and rushed half a mile south to the Beekman Street Hospital, but was dead on arrival. As doctors tried to resuscitate him, the three wounded victims started arriving, also by taxis.<br /> <br /> The murder of Officer Rasmussen was the latest in a series of shootings involving New York Police officers. Two other patrolmen had been killed and four seriously wounded since the first day of the year. One of the wounded, Patrolman Lawrence Ward gunned down on 101st Street in Harlem the same morning of the day Officer Rasmussen was shot, died of his injuries on May 6th and the city was in an uproar.<br /> <br /> Mayor LaGuardia issued an edict from City Hall demanding the police ‘shoot to kill’ any bandits plaguing the streets. All available detectives and patrolmen were launched on a manhunt for Rasmussen’s killers. Dozen of cops congregated in the area to help search for them. Patrol cars from the Battery to Fourteenth Street were ordered to converge in a huge dragnet around the area. Detectives were assigned to cover all railways stations, ferries and main highways out of the city.<br /> <br /> It took the police fifteen days to make the breakthrough in the case.<br /> <br /> Two ace detectives, from Oak Street-Gunson and Kaplan- were given one job: trace that brown coloured Auburn getaway-car.<br /> <br /> No one had remembered the plate number, but some witnesses swore it started with a ‘U.’ That brought the two cops into the Bronx, where it might have been registered. After a lot of footwork, the detectives discovered a car like this may have been parked on Second Avenue in Harlem, and eventually tracked down a young boy, Joseph Borello who lived with his mother in an apartment at number 2165. He knew the car-and even better-who owned it. His name was ‘Whitey’ and he lived on East 109th Street, two blocks south. Calling up reinforcements, the officers rushed to the apartment and found Ralph DeLillo.<br /> <br /> Taken to the Oak Street precinct, DeLillo was ‘vigorously’ questioned by the detectives, finally confessing to his part in the robbery and implicating two of his associates, Alfred Luicci and Gene Giannini who was also using the alias ‘Eugene Giovanni.’ Both men were quickly arrested and booked. They were held without bail as the prosecutor’s office and the police kept investigating, looking for others who might have been involved in the robbery and shoot-out.<br /> <br /> It was believed by the authorities that the gang had intended to hold up the construction office of the huge Knickerbocker Village complex being erected at 137 Cherry Street. The worker’s payroll was due to be delivered on Friday afternoon, but police assigned to guard it became suspicious and delayed its delivery. This may have forced the killers to pick another target in the neighbourhood.<br /> <br /> Interestingly enough, Giannini was found to have an infected wound on his right leg, which may have been a gunshot wound, indicating that although dying, as he fired off his revolver, Police Officer Rasmussen may well have hit one of his targets.<br /> <br /> On May 7th, Police Officer Arthur P. Rasmussen was buried at 3 o’clock with a full Inspector’s funeral in the Moravian Cemetery in New Dorp. Over one hundred police officers attended along with family and friends. He lies buried in the single grave section, number 2819. His wife Sophie and his sons, Eugene and Charles have joined him there, over the years.<br /> <br /> Officer Rasmussen's grave is on the westerly edge of the cemetery. At night, on an adjoining property, the New Dorp Lighthouse’s beacon of light shone out into the Atlantic Ocean guiding vessels into New York Harbor past the notorious West Bank, protecting ships as Officer Rasmussen had protected people in his life as a policeman.<br /> <br /> A year later on May 2nd, Ralph DeLillio, the twenty-seven year old Harlem gangster was sentenced to thirty years in the penitentiary at Sing Sing for the murder of the police officer.<br /> <br /> From records available, he seems to have been the only member of the gang of four that actually did any time for the killing. Eugene Giannini managed to escape this one, although arrogant and filled with a sense of self-importance, he apparently confessed to his mob pals, in years to come, chatting over card games of briscola and trisette in social clubs, how he ‘had knocked off that cop bastard.’<br /> <br /> Joe Valachi, the mobster who turned informant, claimed that Giannini was part of the 107th Street Mob, the group we recognize today as the Luchese Crime Family, under its boss, Giacomo Reina, although it’s possible he was actually connected into the crime family run then by Charley Luciano.<br /> <br /> He was known to his mob associates as 'Gino' or sometimes 'Genie,’ and worked off and on with a tight-knit gang of drug traffickers which included 'Big John' Ormento, Joe Valachi, Fiore Sano, Salvatore Shillitani, Pat Pagano and Pat Moccio.<br /> <br /> Some researchers claim he was a close friend of Luciano and at times, he did business with Anthony Strollo, also known as 'Tony Bender,' a capo, or crew chief, in Luciano’s group, a crooked wheeler and dealer who was also an immediate and personal friend of the mob Machiavelli, Vito Genovese. Giannini, along with boyhood friends from the Greenwich Village area, Pasquale Moccio and Vincenzo Mauro, apparently also helped Strollo in his drug dealing activities.<br /> <br /> Shillitani went back a long way with Joe Valachi. An early associate of Tommy Luchese, he had been part of a street gang formed by Joe, running burglary and break-in teams in the late 1920s. Shillitani was inducted into the Mafia at the same time as Joe, and another tight buddy, Frank Calluce in 1930. Valachi eventually shifted allegiance from the group he was initially elected to, run by Joe Bonanno, into the one run by Luciano. He actually started his mob career with the crime family run by Reina, and may well have been the only hoodlum in the mob to shift base three times throughout his criminal career.<br /> <br /> Shillitani had been born in 1906 in Sicily, his given family name being Scillitano (1) and had immigrated to New York with his family as a child.<br /> <br /> He was hardly that successful as a mobster, spending a lot of his time in prison for various crimes, including drug trafficking that always seemed to go wrong. On a scale of one to ten as a success in his chosen career, he probably rated 100.<br /> <br /> His mob pals called him ‘Solly Shields’ and after limited schooling, he had gone to work as a butcher. He left this job and then linked into Valachi’s street gang. He first served a 2-10 year sentence in prison for attempted robbery in 1925. Paroled from Sing Sing prison in 1928, he was quickly re-arrested for petit larceny and found himself back in the familiar granite building up the Hudson River. Released, he was back there yet again in 1929 for parole violation. He somehow managed to stay clear of the law for a while, but then on January 28th 1932, he and Nicky Paduano were part of a group involved in a shoot-out at the corner of Mace and Paulding Avenues in the Bronx. Twenty-year old Benedetto Bellini got the worst of this and laid down and died. Chased by Police Officer Thomas Qualles, Police Commissioner Muldoon’s driver, Nicky also ended up dead, courtesy of the cop’s .38, and Solly finished up in cuffs.<br /> <br /> On May 25th., in front of Judge Barrett in the Bronx County Court, 27 year old Shillitani was found guilty of the manslaughter of Benedetto Bellino, and went away on a twenty year sentence, serving fourteen, and being released in 1946. At this point, never obviously a good learner, he decided to go donkey-deep into drug trafficking.<br /> <br /> A police officer whose path kept crossing Shillitani’s said of him:<br /> <br /> ‘He’s been a bum and a hood all his life. His associates are all bums and hoods and he’ll die a hoodlum. He’s just no good.’<br /> <br /> He and Joe had less than a stellar relationship as they moved through the Mafia underworld, scuffling for their share of the money-making opportunities all mobsters seem to devote their lives to finding. They also had their run-ins on numerous occasions.<br /> <br /> Sometime in August, 1951, Sal went up to Joe’s bar and grill, The Lido Bar on Castle Hill Avenue, in The Bronx. A few days before Valachi had supplied his friend with a quarter of a kilo of heroin, which Shillitani had on sold, unknowingly to an agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics code-named ‘Pocoroba.’ The drug however, turned out to be less than perfect.<br /> <br /> ‘Joe,’ Shillitani said, ‘that merchandise you gave me, that is not on par, it’s not what you said it is. I got the guy "‘Pocoroba’" with me, out in the car, and he is kicking like hell.’<br /> <br /> ‘I can’t do nothing,’ said Joe, ‘it’s the way I get it, and the way I give it. I give you my word, I never touch it. The way I get it is the way I give to you. Any future time I can make good for it, let us see.’<br /> <br /> ‘Solly Shields’ spent a lot more time in the pen than Joe, but managed to outlive him by almost twenty years, dying in a Miami hospice in 1990, aged 84!<br /> <br /> By the early 1940s, Giannini was running a variety of legitimate businesses, including a venture in restaurant supplies, and a garbage collection firm called the Eagle Waste Company. These were convenient covers for the illegitimate operations he supervised from his office at East 74th Street, which included gambling, loan sharking and the wholesaling of drugs. In between his frequent sojourns in the state prison, Shillitani also ran horse-betting and policy books with Giannini from these premises.<br /> <br /> Giannini got himself married to a woman who had come to America from Sicily and they had two children.<br /> <br /> He was arrested again in 1942 by agents of the Federal Narcotics Bureau for peddling drugs, and served fifteen months in prison. He kept clear of the law through the rest of this period, and early in 1950 was apparently putting together a deal with two of his close associates, Shillitani and Giacomo Reina, members of the 107th Street Mob, now working under the control of Gaetano Gagliano.<br /> <br /> Reina’s father, Gaetano, had been the family head until he was gunned down in February 1930 during the mob war that perhaps resulted in the restructuring and formation of the New York Mafia crime families that operate to this day.<br /> <br /> The deal Giannini and the other two family members had set up, involved him personally shipping high demand medical drugs such as penicillin and sulphur based medicines, both in short supply following the end of the world war, into Italy, and using the profits from this to purchase heroin to bring back into New York.<br /> <br /> Giannini would in addition, take along on his trip, 15000 dollars in forged US currency for sale to the highest bidder, to help bolster the pot. He also wanted to take the opportunity to re-establish contact with members of the Paris and Marseilles French-Corsican drug gangs, people he had associated with during the late 1940s, frequenting bars and taverns on the New York waterfront. Men like Joseph Orsini, Marius Ansaldi, Francois Spirito, and Jean David, veterans of the European drug-trafficking business, who had operated prior to, and then after the end of the Second World War. These men controlled the flow of narcotics through Paris and Marseilles, and the major ports of Cherbourg and Le Havre.<br /> <br /> The big and balding Ansaldi dominated the Paris branch of the Corsica/French junta which was based in Marseilles and around the Place Pigalle in Paris, and he had been involved in drug trafficking for over thirty years. One of the reasons behind Giannini’s visit to Europe was to meet up with Ansaldi and consolidate his New York-French connection with him.<br /> <br /> Linked to the European based group in North America was Tony d’Agostino, who headed up and oversaw the importation of cargo into Canada and New York. He was based initially in Montreal from 1946, moving to Mexico City in 1948. He was another major contact that Giannini had developed, and the Algerian-Frenchman also counted many other mob family notables as friends and customers, including Frank Scalice, a senior capo in the New York Mafia family run by Vincenzo Mangano<br /> <br /> With his wife and children, and a big, roomy Cadillac full of product hidden away in secret compartments, Giannini drove up into Canada. Sailing from Montreal early in 1950, he landed at Le Havre in France. This was the first of three trips he would make to Europe in the next two years.<br /> <br /> He first travelled to Paris where he met up with his Corsican connections, and then drove south into Italy and to Naples to touch base with his old friend Charley Luciano, now living there in exile since his deportation from America.<br /> <br /> According to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Luciano was knee deep in drug peddling, acting as a vital link between Italian and American mob interests. He was undoubtedly at the great Mafia gabfest that was held at The Grand Hotel des Palmes in Palermo in 1957, that amongst other things, perhaps helped solidify drug dealing arrangements between the two countries.<br /> <br /> Charley Luciano aka Lucky Luciano aka Charles Ross, aka Salvatore Lucania lived in Italy, not from choice, but by default. Convicted on prostitution charges in 1936 in New York, he was sent to prison, effectively for the rest of his life. By what could be called an amazing series of coincidences, or as some referred to it: ‘Lucky’s Luck,’ he found himself free after ten years, although having to suffer the indignity of forced deportation back to his place of birth.<br /> </p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236989867,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /></p>
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<div style="text-align:center;font-weight:bold;">Photo: Charley Luciano and two of his young admirers</div>
<p><br /> He left New York early in 1946, on a scuttlebutt cargo ship called the ’Laura Keane’ and stepped off it in Palermo, Sicily. Legend has it, getting on the boat he had $150, getting off, wrapped in his underwear in one of his suitcases was stashed $150,000. Like so many mob fables, this may be true, then again, it may be simple fiction that has turned into fact because it has been repeated enough times over the years.<br /> <br /> Charley in due course, settled in mainland Italy, eventually in Naples where he lived the rest of his life leaving only briefly towards the end of 1946. Using a most circuitous route via Venezuela, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro, he travelled to Cuba, arriving there on October 29th.<br /> <br /> He stayed firstly at the Hotel Nacional, and then at a spacious private residence in the exclusive neighbourhood of Miramar, only a few blocks from the home of the Cuban president. This house belonged to General Perez Damera, chief of the Cuban general staff. Indalecio Pertierra, a Cuban parliamentarian and manager of the Havana Jockey Club, used his clout to arrange legal residence for Charley.<br /> <br /> When the FBN discovered Charley was in Cuba, they brought pressure to bear through their own government to have him deported, and he was kicked out on March 20th 1947<br /> <br /> In the meantime, in late December, mob bosses from America- Italian and Jewish- descended on the Nacional and some kind of underworld conference took place over the next few days. We really have no idea what was discussed at this conclave as there is no hard evidence from any reliable source.<br /> <br /> It is logical to assume however, that on the agenda may well have been narcotic trafficking from Italy into America. Luciano had probably decided this was his route to wealth, now that he had lost the jewel in his crown-New York- and this meeting was the rational venue to lay down some rules and maybe establish contacts.<br /> <br /> From that meeting probably grew Luciano’s eventual complex, interlocking network of dealers and managers, who helped him run his drug trafficking business. They included:<br /> <br /> In Sicily, possibly Nicola Gentile and Giuseppe Settecasi in Agrigento; Frank Coppola in Partinico, and Sal and Ugo Caneba, who supervised the many illegal heroin labs located on the island, creating the heroin from the raw materials shipped from the Far East through the ‘Corsican Connection.’<br /> <br /> On the mainland, he had Joe Pici, an alleged former soldier in the Vincent Mangano crime family that was based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He looked after Genoa and Milan, along with Giovanni and Corrado Maugeri; Frank Barone and Joe Arena handled things in Rome. Then, there was Alberts Barras and Antonio, Giuseppe and Sebastiano Bellanca and Tommy Martino another expatriate Mangano soldier, helping to feed the shipments from the ports of Italy into New York, Detroit and Canada.<br /> <br /> A bewildering multitude of men from all over Italy and New York. Short, squat, dark-skinned, black-haired characters who look at you from mug shots with eyes that crepitate with the venom you would expect from serial killers waiting to pounce on their next victims.<br /> <br /> The Federal Bureau of Narcotics had been trying for over 20 years to bust the American Mafia’s hold on the dope trafficking business. They were extremely successful in this respect. Between 1956 and 1964 they were responsible for the arrest and conviction of 206 Mafia members for crimes involving drug trafficking, some of the more notorious being Vito Genovese, Big John Ormento and Carmine Galante.<br /> <br /> The FBN was abolished, and incorporated into the BNDD Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968, and then the DEA Drug Enforcement Agency in July 1973.<br /> <br /> Formed originally in 1930 under its commissioner, Harry J. Anslinger, the FBN had recognized the mob for what it was long before Hoover and his Federal Bureau would even acknowledge that the entity even existed. The FBN believed that the Mafia was ideally situated to operate in the illegal narcotics business which by its very nature is international in dimension. The Sicilian arm of the honoured society liaised with the many Mafiosi who had been deported back into Italy from America and who had the contacts still in place in the major cities like New York. They also used connections in Turkey and the Middle East, as well as their Corsican allies, and their links into the French drug laboratories, to ensure a continuous flow of the raw opium material and its processing into the finished powder base.<br /> <br /> After his stay in Naples, Giannini and his family, motored down through Italy, crossed the Straights of Messina and travelled across Sicily to Palermo. There, a Packard convertible, bought with some of the proceeds of the drugs and counterfeit money, was packed with heroin, stashed away and welded into secret compartments under the car’s wings. The vehicle was taken back into North America by a courier who brought along his aged mother as a decoy for any inquisitive custom agent. The car came ashore in Montreal aboard the S.S. Empress of Canada . It was then driven down into Vermont, where Giannini himself was waiting, having returned from his own travels in Europe. The car and its contents were taken to New York, where the drugs were disposed of.<br /> <br /> The success of this first venture encouraged Giannini into his further visits into Europe, but on these, he travelled alone, leaving his wife and children in New York. During the spring and summer of 1950 he moved between New York, Paris and Palermo. It seems that through the rest of 1950 and into 1951, he organized a steady stream of American-Italian tourists, bringing their big, cavernous automobiles with them, into Europe, mainly via the port of Le Havre, in northern France. Groups which a cynical FBN agent referred to in a report as ‘Giannini’s European Tours.’ The cars would be driven into Paris or Palermo, and while they were being serviced at a pre-selected garage, loaded up with packets of heroin. The couriers would then make their way back via liners such as The Queen Elizabeth or The Queen Mary which would dock in New York. Giannini would also use theSS Scythia , which came into North America at Quebec.<br /> <br /> This routine went on without a hitch until April 1951. Giannini, on one of his European visits, was driving from the French Riviera into Italy, when he was stopped at the San Remo checkpoint by the Guardia di Finanza , the Italian Financial Police, who also operate the custom service and man the border check points. Arrested and taken before a magistrate in Ventimigila, near Liguria, he was remanded to await trial on a charge of complicity in distributing counterfeit money. One of his associates in the scam the previous year had been arrested and had named Gino as his supplier.<br /> <br /> This may have been Pierre Lafitte, who approached the FBN to help him avoid deportation, from New York, by offering to help the agency set up a major sting operation that would help snare Joseph Orsini, the fourty-eight year old fellow Corsican.<br /> <br /> A one-time resident of New York, living in a Brownstone at 26 W. 85th Street, near Central Park, Orsini was now based in France, working closely with a number of major heroin traffickers and their chemists. With his melon shaped head, and pencil-thin moustache, he looked like a worn out version of Inspector Clouseau from the Pink Panther movies. A former merchant seaman, with a long criminal record and convictions for fraud, robbery and collaboration with the Germans during World War Two, he used his contacts in the maritime trade to have drugs smuggled from Europe into New York, using seamen as couriers.<br /> <br /> He was imprisoned on Ellis Island awaiting deportation as an alien. Knowing he would have to leave America, sooner than later, Orsini persuaded Lafitte, also in custody on the island, to become a partner in his latest drug importing deal that also linked Shillitani, Pat Pagano, Moccio and another drug dealer, Larry Quartiero. Because they both came from Corsica, maybe Orsini felt a bond with the other Frenchman; felt he was a man he could trust because of his roots. He couldn’t have been more wrong as it turned out.<br /> <br /> Concurrently, the FBN’s European office was launching its own investigation into Frank Callace and his major chemist contact, Carlo Migliandi, who was eventually charged with arranging the exportation of over 800 kilos of heroin into America between 1946 and 1953. Through Charles Siragusa, the FBN’s head of its first European office in Rome, the agency kept up so much pressure on the expatriate New York mobsters resident in Italy, that Charley Luciano even confided in his family to check his suit pockets when he died and was laid out, in case agents planted drugs on his corpse!<br /> <br /> Dominic ‘The Gap‘ Petrelli who was a good friend of Joe Valachi, and a previous member of the Mafia underworld in New York, now lived in Italy, having been deported there after his arrest and conviction in 1942 for drug trafficking in Arizona, in one of the first major cases built by the FBN against the mob. He had purchased some of Giannini’s counterfeit dollars, and had been arrested in Naples trying to pass them on. Questioned by the Carabinieri, the Italian military police, he himself then had turned informer and also blew the whistle on Giannini.<br /> <br /> Swamped by this bow-wave of treachery, Gino was imprisoned in one of Italy’s worse penitentiaries: the Poggio Reale Prison in Naples. Held here for ten months as the slow cogs of the Italian judiciary system ground along, he eventually began sending letters to the FBN’s Italian director, Charles Siragasu. Some were abusive, many pleaded for help to get him released. He thought the FBN would oil the wheels of justice for him because in addition to being a killer, a Mafiosi and a drug dealer, Eugenio Giannini had, for a number of years, been a confidential informant for the FBN.<br /> <br /> Although he was selective in what he offered the bureau, they were aware of his strategy and kept a discreet, but close watch on him, while using his information to help nail other drug smugglers. It’s possible he went with them sometime in the 1930s, following yet another arrest, this time in a narcotics-conspiracy case, as a means of mitigating his sentence.<br /> <br /> One of the letters he sent Siragasu, referred in some detail to his knowledge of and transactions with Charley Luciano, and his associates Joe Pici and Frank Callace, in their drug dealing activities, and inferred that Giannini could offer the FBN a lot of confidential information linking Luciano into various narcotic deals that had gone down.<br /> <br /> Giannini finished his dispatch, ‘Destroy this letter after reading it. If it gets into the wrong hands I might as well buy a slot in a cemetery.’ It was a prophecy with an ominous ring of truth about it.<br /> <br /> Early in 1952, he was eventually brought to trial and released for lack of evidence.<br /> <br /> Petrelli, the hood who had originally denounced him, had retracted his testimony, a not unusual occurrence in mob trials. In addition, a New York lawyer had visited Italy and may well have come to an ‘arrangement’ with an Italian member of the judiciary system. Whatever the trigger was, Giannini was released from Poggio Reale in February, 1952.<br /> <br /> Although he had spent months in prison, he had not been idle. Just before his arrest, he had purchased 10 kilos of heroin from Marius Ansaldi, one of the redoubtable members of the Corsican criminal mob, the bald, giant of a man who dominated the Paris drug trade. The money to finance this had been supplied by his New York associates, Shillitani, Reina and possibly his Greenwich Village boyhood pals, Moccio, all soldiers in the Luchese crime family, and Mauro who was linked into Strollo and the Mafia clan of Luciano, controlled by Frank Costello at that time.<br /> <br /> Mauro was tight with Vito Genovese, a man so devious, he kept his right hand in his pocket while shaking hands with his left, and they were both partners in a pin-ball machine company called New Deal Distributors. Mauro also known in the mob as ‘Vinnie Morrow,’ was also a close aid and confident of Tony Strollo, and through him, may well have been involved in the attempted hit on Frank Costello in 1957, acting as the ‘point man’ for the Vincent Gigante the alleged gunman, who couldn’t shoot straight, and although firing a .38 calibre revolver at Frank from no more than ten feet, did no more damage, than to create a new hair parting for the family boss.<br /> <br /> It was not unheard of for mobsters from different crime families to work together on a project like this intercontinental narcotic conspiracy. Giannini had organized for the dope to be taken to Milan and stored in a tailor’s shop on the Via Durmi. He then arranged for his brother-in-law, Giuseppe Pellegrino one of the many expatriate New York mobsters based now in Europe, and who may have acted as a kind of ‘chief-of-staff for Charley Luciano in Italy to visit him in the Naples prison, and asked him to uplift the dope and take it and store it at his own home at #27 via Alfaro in Salerno, south of Rome.<br /> <br /> Freed from prison, Giannini was in no rush to return to New York. His friends Shillitani, et al. had been arrested in late 1951 on a narcotics indictment, and Gino thought it a smart move to stay in Italy and apply for citizenship based on his parentage. But the FBN got wind of his scheme, and brought political pressure down on the Italian government to block the application. Giannini was subsequently expelled from Italy.<br /> <br /> Charles Siragusa, the head of the Rome office, was largely instrumental in organizing Giannini’s deportation. He harboured an especially strong dislike for the drug dealer, to some extent generated by an unusual and capricious event he had experienced.<br /> <br /> He had hired a young, pretty woman to be his secretary. She was an American, living in Rome with her husband, who was studying there under the G.I. Bill. One day, he was dictating a report to her on the drug dealer when she suddenly burst into tears. It transpired she was a niece of Eugenio Giannini, and she hated him with a vengeance. As a teen-ager, he had continually harassed her with his sexual advances and lewd gestures, and it had left an indelible print on her memory. Siragusa could never get over what the odds were that out of the millions of people in Rome, he would choose this particular woman for this job. To him, it simply confirmed what a low-life philistine he was dealing with, and in terms of Eugenio Giannini, we can see to-day, how Murphy and his law, operates at all levels of the spectrum.<br /> <br /> Giannini arrived back in New York, touching down at 12.30p.m. on April 8th, 1952 at Idlewild Airport. As he left the plane, he was taken into custody by FBN agent Al Giuliani. Named as a defendant along with twelve others on the narcotics case that had bagged Shillitani- docket number 136-148 in the Southern District of New York- he was arrested and then released on bail of $15000. He had five months to live.<br /> <br /> From this point on, the details regarding the ultimate fate of Eugenio Giannini comes from the testimony of Joseph Valachi (below), arguably one of the most famous mob turncoats ever. He claimed he was called to a meet with Tony Bender. They joined each other for dinner at Rocco’s, the famous Greenwich Village restaurant run by the Respinto family, on Thompson Street.<br /> </p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236990494,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /></p>
<p><br /> <br /> Bender told Valachi that word had come down from Charley Luciano that Giannini was an informer, talking to the ‘junk agents.’ Under normal circumstance, Giannini’s own crime family would have taken care of the problem, but Vito Genovese, back from his self-imposed exile in Italy was working hard to re-establish himself as a power in the New York mob, and regain control of the Luciano crime family, now under the control of Frank Costello, and he was as Valachi explained it, ‘anxious to throw the first punch.’ Luciano being the injured party, and still the titular head of the crime family that Valachi, Bender and Genovese were all part of, created the opening needed.<br /> <br /> Valachi was between a rock and a hard place. He had known Giannini for years, and the little, ugly mobster in fact owned him $2000. He knew that this would be used against him if he tried to shield Giannini in anyway, and so to forestall that, told Bender that he would find him. In the convoluted and devious universe of the Mafia, to ‘find him’ meant to seek him out and kill him. According to Bender he and his associates had been unable to locate Giannini who was moving about town.<br /> <br /> Valachi simply picked up the telephone and dialled Gino’s home, reaching the mobster immediately, proving beyond any doubt that Bender‘s IQ was perhaps not that of a genius..<br /> <br /> They met that night in the Bronx, but Valachi spotted a suspicious looking car parked in the vicinity of the bar where they sat drinking, and called the meeting off. A few days later, Valachi arranged another get-together, and this time, brought along one of the men he had chosen to carry out the hit on Giannini, a mobster called Joe Pagano, the brother of Pat, his drug-dealing associate.<br /> <br /> The killing of Giannini is a classic example of how the hierarchy in the Mafia insulate themselves from any direct contact with their victims. The order may have originally came down from Luciano, safely ensconced thousands of miles away in Naples. His instructions were relayed to Vito Genovese who then passed the word down to his subordinate Tony Bender. He would be nowhere near the scene of the killing however, as he would simply pass on the command to Valachi who himself who not be directly involved.<br /> <br /> For the actual hit, Valachi choose three men: Joe Pagano and his brother Pat, and his young nephew, his sister Filamino's son, Fiore Siano.<br /> </p>
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<div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Photo: The Pagano Brothers, Pat on the left and Joe on the right</span></div>
<p><br /> This second rendezvous took place in a bar in the Bronx, called The Casbah. Joe Pagano was along for two reasons. First to get a good look at the man he was going to kill, and also, to make the next meeting between Giannini and Pagano go down smoothly. Valachi bought the drinks, and even lent Giannini $100 as the gangster claimed he was running short of cash. That must have really hurt Joe, knowing he would never see any of his money again.<br /> <br /> A few days later Valachi learned that Giannini was working as a ‘drop escort’ at a dice game in Harlem. Escorts would meet prospective gamblers a block or so from the actual game, check them out, and if okay, escort them to the game site.<br /> <br /> Valachi decided this would be the window of opportunity he would open to have the hit carried out, but then ran into another problem. The dice game was operated by Paul Correale, a soldier in the same family as Giannini and mob protocol demanded that something like a killing going down in its vicinity had to be cleared through the proper channels. Valachi again contacted Bender who promised to sort it out with his boss, Genovese, who in turn would seek out and clear it with Tommy Luchese, head of the family that Gianni and Correal were part of.<br /> <br /> As it happened, Bender never got around to sorting the problem out, and some time later, Joe Valachi was called onto the carpet by Vito Genovese, who apparently gave him a dressing down at his office in Erb Strapping Company, one of his legitimate fronts at 180 Thompson Street. It operated as one of the largest service companies in the frozen and tin meats business in the Port of New York. It also acted as a major transhipment points for heroin smuggled into New York.<br /> <br /> Correale, also know in the underworld as ‘Paulie Ham,’ was another major junk pusher in the Luchese family, and complained to Genovese that because the murder had been committed so close to his crap game, it had cost him $10,000 to straighten things out with the local police precinct. Just how Valachi, incessantly broke, and Bender tighter than a virgin’s daughter handled this one, was never disclosed.<br /> <br /> Late on the evening of September 19th, Giannini left the terraced row house where he was currently living, at 282 West 234 Street in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, and drove south into Harlem. The 8 mile journey might have taken him 20 minutes, depending on the traffic that Saturday.<br /> <br /> The two Pagano’s and Siano Fiore met up with Giannini at the drop and walked with him towards the site of the dice game which was located close to 112th Street. Somewhere near the game, at approximately 5 a.m. on the morning of the 20th, someone shot him, twice in the head, with a .38 calibre handgun. The classic mob hit: a double-cap.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236991460,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />It is almost certain the shootist was Siano (right). Tall and slim, with a shock of thick, black hair, the 25 year old was a hit-man in anticipation, anxious to make his bones for the mob. Valachi knew Siano’s pedigree was just waiting to be proved and it’s more than likely he did just this that early morning in some dark, fetid alley in East Harlem.<br /> <br /> In a police photo he looks at the camera with a sneer across his face; left eye drooping slightly, contempt for law and order emanating from him like the calefaction from his life’s ambition to be a wise-guy, whatever the cost.<br /> <br /> He got his wish in 1954, after the Mafia opened the books-allowing in new membership after a 25 year hiatus. Joe Valachi sponsored his nephew, along with the Pagano brothers and Vincent Mauro, allcugines or young men in waiting, who were made into the crime family now referred to as the Genovese or West Side Mob. He joined a crew of hard-nosed guys, under Tony Bender the skipper, one of whom, down the track, would became relatively famous in the crime family. A thick-set, ex boxer called Vincent Gigante. The same one who spent weeks practicing his marksmanship with a .38 revolver in a cellar in Greenwich Village, and still couldn’t his squat at ten feet when he tried to make Frank Costello go away.<br /> <br /> A year down the track, Siano would again help his uncle Joe kill another man, Steven Franse, in the kitchen of Joe’s restaurant in the Bronx. Siano had a somewhat chequered career in the mob, being arrested numerous times, for burglary and robbery with a gun, and received a eight year stretch in 1954 for violation of the Federal Narcotics Laws. He went down for being as assistant district attorney Fred Nathan claimed: ‘the principal dealer in cocaine along the Eastern seaboard.’<br /> <br /> Fiore disappeared from Patsy’s Pizzeria on 1st Avenue, between 117th and 118th Streets early in 1964. The first pizzeria to open in New York in 1933, it was a preferred mob hangout for the wise guys uptown. Three men stopped by to talk with him and they all left. It’s quite possible, two of the men were the Pagano brothers, as Patsy’s was Joe Pagano’s favourite pizza place in New York until he died. The underworld thought Fiore was talking to law enforcement, always a one-way ticket to somewhere unpleasant for anyone in the mob.<br /> <br /> In Sicily they call it Lupara Bianca, a Mafia killing in which all traces of the victim are removed. The New York underworld inhabited by Italian-Americans referred to it as goingsquadoosh .<br /> <br /> Joe Pagano and his brother Pat, would each eventually become a capo in the Genovese family, and powerful members of the mob.<br /> <br /> In 1959, Joe Pagano landed a job as an 'executive' at Murray's Packing, a meat dealer run by Murray Weinberg. In 1961 he somehow got himself promoted to president of the company. In a 'long-firm' fraud scam "buying heavily from suppliers, selling off everything and not paying creditors" the company went bust. The fraud included the crime family of Carlo Gambino, managed by their financial whiz-Carmine Lombardozzi- and when it went to court, Joe tried to accept full responsibility for the losses incurred: somewhere between $800,00 and $1,000,000. The jury however refused his excuse that he had 'gambled it away.' In a civil law suit brought in 1964, Joe was convicted went to prison, being released in 1970 when he agreed to a token payment in retribution of $70,000. From the meat scam he moved seamlessly into another involving illegally factoring Medicaid claims, mainly in the Bronx.<br /> <br /> He was also very involved in the entertainment business. There is an apocryphal story that when Frank Costello stepped down after the attempted assassination attempt in 1957, Vito Genovese made him pass over his shares in the famous Copacabana Club in New York to Joe. Joe Pagano died of natural causes in 1989.<br /> <br /> His brother Pat, started off his working life as a bricklayer, following in the path of his immigrant father, Donato. The elder brother eventually became a power in Local 59 of the International Bricklayer's Helpers. He worked closely with Tony Strollo managing his interests on the New Jersey docks. He was murdered on April 27th., 1974, in the Bronx.<br /> <br /> His killer was never identified, although brother Joe claimed he knew who did it but had to 'pass on it,' inferring he had been instructed not to get involved by his crime family's administration.<br /> <br /> Back in Harlem, police were alerted by someone to the sound of gunshots in the early hours of Saturday morning, and arrived outside the Jefferson Major Athletic Club on 2nd Avenue between 111th and 112th Streets. There was blood on the sidewalk but no body. Thirty minutes later another call brought a police car to 107th Street, five blocks south, and there, the responding cops found a body lying face up in the gutter.<br /> <br /> A deli owner, opening his shop, had found Eugenio Giannini sprawled in death. Dressed in a light tan jacket, brown slacks and shoes, he was wearing an expensive Swiss watch and had a billfold containing $140 in his pocket.<br /> </p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236991500,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /></p>
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<div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Eugenio Giannini dead on 107th Street</span></div>
<p><br /> At first it was thought the dumping of Giannini on 107th Street was some kind of symbolic gesture, the area being the heartland of the Luchese family, but Valachi confirmed it was much simpler. After his hit squad had done their job and left, two other men working the drop with Giannini had found him still breathing, and were rushing him to the Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital at 5th Avenue and 106th Street, but he died en route and they simply ditched the body into the street.<br /> <br /> That Eugenio Giannini’s body lay cooling in death that early September morning is not in doubt. What is in doubt, is exactly how he came to be in that fetid gutter in Harlem. Joe Valachi’s story has the ring of truth in terms of the mechanics of the hit, but it is entirely possible that the driving energy to see Giannini killed was more about money than honour or dishonour.<br /> <br /> It is a given in the Mafia that the number one abuse of power is betrayal of the oath, and ratting out someone has only one punishment. But screwing a mobster out of his precious money runs a close second. Cosa Nostra might literally mean ‘Our Thing,’ but a more metaphysical interpretation could easily be ‘Our Dough,’ for the mob exists for one thing and one thing only-money.<br /> <br /> It is the Sacred Grail of all made men, the very reason for the existence of the modern day Mafia, and Giannini had broken the boundaries on that second revered covenant. Although Tony Bender had told Valachi that the hit had to go down to avenge the wrong done to Luciano, back in Naples. the FBN believed that Gino was killed not because he was an informant, but because he had tried to screw his associates out of most of their share of that ten kilos of heroin he had purchased just before he was arrested at San Remo.<br /> <br /> He maybe got the clip not because he dropped a dime on Charley Luciano, but because he double-dipped his drug partners. The bureau believed that Giannini had organized someone to visit his brother-in-law, Joe Pellegrino, collect six of the ten kilos and bring them back to America to him alone. To Giannini, this could have been worth almost $100,000 a fortune then, and a huge sum for a man who was terminally broke. The FBN had in fact just this gem of information from another one of their hundreds of informants within the mob who had passed on this tit bit of intelligence to his handler.<br /> <br /> George White, the infamous FBN agent, revealed this piece of information at the State Crime Commission hearings, in November, 1952, although he was perhaps necessarily vague on the actual motive for the killing of Giannini.<br /> <br /> The agency substituted one of their agents, Tony Zirillo, into the role of pick-up man, and he left New York in August and flew to Rome. In a complex sting operation organized by the FBN and the Guardia di Finanza , Pelligrino was arrested with the six kilos of heroin. Although the New York media did not cover the operation, the Italian press did. Within a few days, the men back in New York who had financed the deal, knew what had gone down.<br /> <br /> So it’s quite feasible that Bender, knowingly or otherwise, only told Valachi part of the story. At the end of the day, the semantics of the hit were really less significant than its ultimate outcome. How Eugenio Giannini got it, was perhaps a lot more relevant than why. And we owe a debt of gratitude to Joe Valachi for sharing the details of that with us.<br /> <br /> Informants like Valachi are enduringly important to law enforcement and Mafia historians trying to make sense of the seemingly senseless mob hits that go down with illimitable regularity. He and his like, are a kind of Rosetta Stone, helping to unlock the process of decrypting the almost always impossible code of silence that helps to protect the men who make the decisions to remove the irritants and the killers who carry out the dematerialization.<br /> <br /> In the never-ending saturnine maze that constituted the New York Mafia’s convoluted mob politics, Giannini was more a 60 watt light bulb than a chandelier. When he tried to shine his light into the dark corners, it led him, unerringly down a one-way street, and all too soon, he found himself short-circuited for good. A man who lived a life of unremitting perfidy, lying, cheating, stealing, double-dealing and womanising, wearing his lack of conscience as an attachment deficit like the trousers he pulled on every morning, he found out that treachery was synonymous with betrayal, and both traits could only ever lead to the inevitable two in the head.<br /> <br /> A not uncommon occurrence that occurs with monotonous predictability in the world that people like Giannini inhabited.<br /> <br /> Joe Valachi, who comes in and out of Giannini’s story like a recurring bad dream, gave evidence at a senate hearing on organized crime in 1963. Among the dozens of atoms of mob intelligence and underworld mythology he offered, some true, some not so true, there was this, which probably speaks louder about Mafia mores than any FBI report or Intel ever did:<br /> <br /> ‘In the circle in which I travel, a dumb man is more dangerous than a hundred rats.’<br /> <br /> There is a saying in Ecclesiastes:<br /> <br /> ‘……..and there is a man that prolonged his life in his evil doings.’<br /> <br /> For Gene Giannini it just didn’t work out that way. He never got around to living the long haul. He was a dead man in waiting. His never-ending search for the pot at the end of the rainbow supply chain brought him only a non-returnable one-way ticket out of the remorseless and implacable world of Cosa Nostra . He was a man who had ceaselessly searched for the best room in the mansion of life and always ended up in the bathroom.<br /> <br /> The pay-day for the killing of that brave New York Police officer was eighteen years in the making, but all the more satisfying when it eventually arrived.<br /> <br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">Footnote</span><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><span style="font-weight:bold;">(1) The Origin of Organized Crime in America. David Critchley.</span><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Taylor & Francis, 2008</span></p>
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Being Ernest: The Life and Hard Times of Ernie 'The Hawk' Rupolo
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/being-ernest-the-life-and-hard
2010-11-17T14:00:00.000Z
2010-11-17T14:00:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> I think he is one of my favourite mobsters of all time. The one-eyed killer who couldn't shoot straight.<br /> <br /> Most people have never heard of him. He never achieved any immortal status as a big player in the Mafia crime families of New York, although he longed for and lusted after it. He was probably the rule rather than the exception when it came to setting the standard for the street hoodlums that made up the rank and file of organized crime. A grifter, struggling through the interminable days that made up a year in a journeyman crook's life, constantly looking for the perfect score and never finding it. Doing the dirty jobs for a pittance and getting screwed from every angle by whoever was higher up the rank in the mob hierarchy than he was, which was basically everybody. He had a reputation for being a tough guy, but Ernest Rupolo was basically an idiot looking for justification for his very existence. Alan Block in his book East Side, West Side, calls him a dope and a criminal incompetent; Peter Mass, in The Valachi Papers, says, ' Rupolo apparently carried around his own built-in banana peel.' <br /> <br /> I mean he had dreams of being the head of the Mafia, at least according to his de facto wife, Eleanor. She'd said to him how could he tell anybody what to do, he couldn't even tell her what to do. Talk about a ram butting a dam. High hopes indeed. Still, there was something about him that makes me feel he deserved better than the multiple gunshot holes and knife cavities all over the place, and a concrete block to go skateboarding on in Jamaica Bay.<br /> <br /> Whatever you say about 'The Hawk,' he did achieve a certain kind of fame in a way. Because of him, one of the toughest mob bosses in New York, who ran away, with his tail between his legs, and then came back, almost went to prison, which would have dramatically changed the future of organized crime in New York; and in death, he almost got even with a mobster, a guy he really hated, who ultimately spent more time in jail than Willie Sutton. And at the end, he was centre stage in a courtroom drama that was unique for its rareness. So perhaps his life was not completely a wasteland of opportunities lost. Fourty years plus after the event, I'm probably looking at it all with the eyes of a weary cynic, who has searched too long and too hard to find some kind of redemption in a class of unredeemable people.<br /> <br /> The real mob. The Godfather it ain't.<br /> <br /> Being one of the underworld's least charismatic people, or spectacular successes, there is little information about the man, except, a beautifully written section, in a book by an associate editor of Life magazine, called James Mills. That, and an article in the same magazine, plus there's also a bit in Dom Frasca's book about Vito Genovese, the odd, old newspaper report, and that seems to be the best there is to search out the painful history of a man who seemed destined to always be the guy to get the sand kicked into his face, down on the beach.<br /> <br /> It began for the law on a hot, sultry day-- August 24th., 1964-- off Breezy Point, the terminus of the Rockaway peninsular, at the entrance into Jamaica Bay, in Queens, New York. A body was found, floating in the shallow waters by two men, Nicky Caputo and Butch Spyliopolous, and dragged ashore. There is a photograph of this misshapen, bleached white, bloated heap that was once a human being. It lies face down in the sand, washed by the ebb-tide. The hands are lashed together with rope or plastic line, a dirt stained shirt is clinging to the torso. The lower limbs are nude, although it looks as though his trousers have collapsed around the ankles, and there is a large, concrete building block at his feet. The head is bald: presumably the action of the water along with the decomposition of the body, has leached the hair from his head because in life, he had a full head of hair, dark, though greying at the temples. His right eye socket is open, glaring up at the world in indignation at being exposed like this. 'Go away, and leave me alone,' he seems to be saying, 'I'm just having a break between scams.' According to the pathologist's report, the body had probably been water bound for at least three weeks.<br /> </p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236988853,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /></p>
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<div style="text-align:center;font-weight:bold;">Ernie's dead body</div>
<p><br /> The corpse was taken to the 100 Precinct of the Queens, NYPD, on Rockaway Beach Boulevard. There was enough in the way of identity items to make the police believe it was the body of a known criminal, Ernest Rupolo, and his brother Willie was contacted and brought in to try and confirm this. Willie, a mob groupie, and part-time bookie found it hard to be sure.<br /> <br /> 'It was just-like a skeleton with some stuff on it,' he said.<br /> <br /> But he told the cops to check on a mesh in the stomach, a relic from a hernia operation his brother had when young, and that also, when he was just a kid, a punk had shot out his right eye, and the bullet was still in there, somewhere. Willie also identified the clothes on the body as his own. His brother had been so broke, he had loaned him a shirt, pair of pants even some shoes. Being semi-destitute was par for the course for Ernie, the big-time gangster.<br /> <br /> An autopsy carried out by Medical Examiner Milton Helpern, revealed that Ernie had gone down hard. He had been shot in the head and upper chest four times, and stabbed another eighteen. Digging in among the macerated and putrid flesh, the doctor found five misshapen slugs: four .38 calibre and one, a .45. The big one had in fact been inside Ernie's head for at least forty years since the day he had got into an argument with another young tough, who had settled their dispute by clocking him with a .45 automatic. Somehow, Ernie survived that one, although he lost his right eye, and for the rest of his life had to go around with a patch stuck over the empty socket. True to the underworld code, Ernie would not identify his assailant, but promised to even the score in due course. This proved a lot harder said than done, as whenever Ernie was out on the streets, the punk was in jail and vice-versa. Somehow, the dispute never seemed to get resolved. It was Ernie's first encounter with the fickle finger of fate that would dog him for the rest of his life.<br /> <br /> He was born in New York, in Borough Park, in 1908, and grew up in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. There is little concrete evidence about his early life. Dates and places are vague. He claimed he left school at twelve, fudging his birth certificate, making out that he was in fact fifteen. He got his release from school, and started to do what he always wanted to do, a career of crime.<br /> <br /> His first foray, was to organize a gang, and they racked up perhaps as many as 100 burglaries, before he got arrested at thirteen, receiving a three year suspended sentence. He kept going, and eventually was caught and sentenced to 1-3 years in the New York Reformatory. He was out in ten months, and the first thing he did was buy himself a gun.<br /> <br /> Seemingly, it didn’t help, because the law caught up with again, this time allocating him eight months detention. Sometime during this period, he acquired the nickname, 'The Hawk' because when out robbing, he never missed anything of value to steal. Before he turned twenty, he had a record of six juvenile arrests, and had served two terms in the reformatory.<br /> <br /> By the time he was sixteen, he was a well-seasoned street criminal. At some point during this period, he found himself in a west side Manhattan hotel having a barney with a group of his associates that somehow involved a young girl. According to the way Ernie recalled it, when he told this guy to stop bothering the girl, the response was: 'Shut up. Mind your own business or I'll let you have it.' And Ernie says, 'You punk I wouldn’t' care what you did.'<br /> <br /> So the guy, who was called Eddy Green, pulls open a drawer in a desk, takes out a .45 and wham, locks one onto Ernie. As he goes down, he remembers, the radio in the room is playing 'My Blue Heaven.' Somehow, he survives the shooting, but looses the eye. A reasonable trade I guess, under the circumstances. According to brother Willie, after Ernie was shot, and his face was disfigured, he didn't really care anymore, about anything. That's when he went on the mob's payroll and from the age of seventeen, became a hit man.<br /> <br /> By his late teens, he acquired a reputation as a wild cannon, forming a gang of four that specialized in robbing members of the mob, holding up their bookies and terrorizing their numbers runners. Just why the bosses allowed him to get away with this is a bit of a mystery. Ernie claimed he was often called on the carpet and warned by the top men, but somehow, always avoided the obvious fatal consequences of such acts. Brother Willie, claimed that the bosses were afraid of his brother, the kid was good at his job, and if they missed him the first time there would be no second chance, and he did good work for them after all. But he knew it couldn't go on forever. When he got drunk ( which apparently was often,) he would say to his brother, 'You know, Willie, I'm living on borrowed time. How much more do you think I can go around takin' people?'<img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236988497,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /><br /> <br /> The events that gave Ernie (right) his moment of fame began sometime in 1932. The huge, underground earthquake that came to be known as 'The Castellammarese War,' was over by then, and the New York Mafia had settled down into five well-defined groups: criminal enterprises that would go on, developing for the next seventy years. <br /> <br /> One of the bigger mobs was led by Charlie Luciano, and his alleged underboss, Vito Genovese. Vito had a good friend, fellow gang member, Anthony Strollo, also known as 'Tony Bender.' He was robbed one day, while attending one of his bootleg liquor stashes at a garage he leased. Two men, Ferdinand 'The Shadow' Boccia and Willie Gallo, relieved Tony of $5800. This was an act of madness by the men, who were basically taking on what could well have been the most powerful organized crime group in America. Genovese decided Ferdinand and Willie had to go, and Ernie Rupolo was approached to handle the hit. 'The Shadow' was apparently brassed off with Genovese, because a scam he had created and which brought in $116,000 was shared by everyone and his dog, except him. The strike on Bender was something in the way of compensation in lieu. <br /> <br /> Underworld hits are often convoluted, complicated exercises that can drag on for months, and this one was no exception. There was, however, an added ingredient here, and that was the ineptitude of the principal assassin. Numerous meetings held in bars, coffee shops, and dance halls across Brooklyn, all led, finally to a rendezvous in a restaurant on the corner of Mulberry and Kenmare Streets, in Manhattan's Little Italy district. This was in early spring, 1934. The program was delayed by 90 days, when Rupolo was arrested on a vagrancy charge and locked up in jail. While there, he bumped into an old pal, Rosario Palmieri, known also as 'Solly Young,' and offered him time shares in the killing. For $1000, Solly was happy to be in on the hit.<br /> <br /> At the meeting on Mulberry Street, Ernie was promised $5000 for the killing of Gallo, but only received a down payment of $175 from Michele Miranda, an associate of Vito Genovese, and also one of the major beneficiaries of the Boccia scam. It was unfortunately, all he would ever see in the way of a reward. Fortunately for the organizers of the hits, the Shadows' contract was hired out to other killers who turned out to be seriously good at their job.<br /> <br /> It was decided to set up the murder of Boccia at a card game, and that would be orchestrated by one Peter LaTempa also known as Petie Spatz. The killing would go down on September 19th., 1934. At least two, possibly three shooters had been allocated that one. Gallo was to be hit simultaneously by Ernie and his pal, Solly. <br /> <br /> On the day before, Peter DeFeo, apparently the mob's armourer, later to be a powerful capo, or crew chief in the Genovese crime family, and indelibly linked in through a relative to the infamous 'Amityville Horror' case of the 1970s, supplied Ernie with two .32 automatic pistols. He also delivered two guns to George 'Blah Blah' Smurra and Cosmo 'Gus' Frasca who had been earmarked as the killers of Boccia, who was to be hit at his uncle's coffee shop at 533, Metropolitan Avenue, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.<br /> <br /> Ernie stashed his two guns in the cellar of a friend, Louis 'Chip' Greco, who lived on 65th. Street, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Later, he met up with Solly who was chaperoning Gallo, and the three men spent the next twenty four hours eating, drinking and partying from Bensonhurst to Coney Island and back to Williamsburg. Gallo decided he wanted to visit the sister of Boccia, and there, something occurred, something so Kafkaesque in its conception, as to almost defy believe.<br /> <br /> They arrived at the house about seven in the evening, and mixed with the people who were partying there. At some time that night, Gallo, for some reason, decided to try on a suit of Boccia's that was hanging in a closet. Ernie claimed it didn't look right on him, and suggested that he himself try it on. So Ernie takes off his own suit and gives it to Gallo, and then puts on the suit of 'The Shadow.' When Ernie testified some years later in a King's County court, Judge Samuel Leibowitz asked:<br /> <br /> 'You gave Willie Gallo, the man you were going to kill, your suit?'<br /> <br /> 'Yes.'<br /> <br /> 'Was he wearing your suit when he was found on the street full of lead?'<br /> <br /> 'Yes, sir.'<br /> <br /> 'And you were wearing 'The Shadows' suit, the other man who was killed that night?'<br /> <br /> 'Yes, sir.' <br /> <br /> No one ever bothered to find out who was the final recipient of Gallo's original suit.<br /> <br /> Following this grotesque charade party, Rupolo, Gallo and 'Solly Young' and a couple of young ladies, headed off to the movies. Half way through the program, Ernie, the consummate hit-man, suddenly remembers that he has forgotten to bring along the pieces. He slipped out of the theatre, called a cab, raced to 65th. Street, retrieved the guns, and raced back to the cinema.<br /> <br /> Now you can see why I love this guy?<br /> <br /> Dropping off the girls, the three men then began another interminable migration around New York, first across the East River to Hester Street in Manhattan, then back to Coney Island, and then finally, by subway up to 71st. Street in Bensonhurst, the place Ernie had chosen as the killing field. On the way into Little Italy by subway, he slipped his pal, Solly, one of the automatics.<br /> <br /> It was now, about 2 a.m. on the morning of September 20th., 1934. 'The Shadow' was already dead; he had been dispatched with maximum efficiency by Gus Frasca and George Smurra over in Williamsburg, hours before. Although there were eleven witnesses to the shooting, nobody, as usual in a mob hit, knew anything. <br /> <br /> Walking north from the subway station, Ernie’s group reached the corner of Sixty-eight Street and Fourteenth Avenue. At this point, Ernie pulls out his gun, shoves into Gallo's ear and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. Again, zilch. Third time, nada. Gallo, even though drunk, wonders what is going on. 'What the hell you doing?' he asks Ernie. 'Nothing,' says 'The Hawk,' I'm only kidding you, the gun ain't loaded.' It was of course, it just wasn't co-operating. <br /> <br /> Now even drunk, and having a gun stuck in his face, Gallo shows consideration for his friend, telling Ernie with his record, he shouldn't be wandering around with a gat in his belt, what if the cops stop him? So Ernie promises to get rid of it and walks away a few blocks. In fact, he went back to his friend 'Chip' Greco's home, banging on the door, getting his bleary-eyed friend out of bed, and demanding some oil to grease up his weapon.<br /> <br /> 'Hello,' Ernie says, ' get me some gun oil quick, I'm in need of a fix.' Greco obliges, and Ernie douses the weapon, checks the slide and mechanism, and off he goes for try number two.<br /> <br /> He meets up with Solly, and says, 'We'll get the bastard this time, and just don't forget, this is a double-banger.' They walk Greco down to Sixty-sixth street and on the corner of Thirteenth Avenue, out come the pistols, and bang, bang, bang.<br /> <br /> When Judge Leibowitz asked Ernie:<br /> <br /> 'How many times did you fire at Gallo?' Ernie replied ' Oh, about nine times, but we had some misses.'<br /> <br /> Picture the scene: A street corner in Brooklyn, maybe the moonlight reflecting off shop windows, street lamps dimly lighting the shadows, two men shooting vainly at a standing target, weaving in a drunken stupor, from perhaps only inches away, and still they manage to miss with some of the shots. Talk about the gang that couldn't shoot straight!<br /> <br /> Gallo goes down at last, according to Ernie, gasping out the immortal words all good New York hoods part from this mortal coil with, ' Oh, Ma!' just like Jimmy Cagney in the movies. Solly and Ernie drift off, and go and get a few hours well deserved sleep at the home of poor old 'Chip' Greco. The next day, Ernie goes over to Manhattan to collect his reward for a job well-done, and receives the bad news from an understandably irate Miranda. After all that time and energy expended, Gallo is still alive. Genovese arranged for Ernie and Solly to go into hiding, and they were sent up to Springfield, Massachusetts. After a few days, Solly cuts loose and returns to the city. A couple of weeks later, Ernie follows suit. As he gets off the train at Canal Street, the cops are waiting there to pick him up. Gallo has identified him and Solly as the men who shot him.<br /> <br /> Ernie was taken to Gallo's bedside in the King's County Hospital, where he is literally fingered by the wounded man.<br /> <br /> Gallo says to Ernie, ' Why did you shoot me?'<br /> <br /> Ernie's response is, 'Why did you tell on me?'<br /> <br /> Gallo remonstrates, 'But that ain't the question I am asking you?'<br /> <br /> To which Rupolo replies, 'What's the difference what I shot you for? You could get revenge later on, instead of talking, saying I shot you.'<br /> <br /> In gangland, you can do anything but be a rat informer. You can rape and pillage and loot and murder and double-cross, but woe betide anyone who has the temerity to tell the truth to the law, especially about another member of the fraternity. And so, Ernie goes away to prison for eight years and six months. When he comes out in 1942, he is twenty-seven years old. <br /> <br /> In 1944, operating a luncheonette in Borough Park, Brooklyn, which he had somehow found the funds to purchase, he gets involved in another situation this time with a target he later described as 'a real-good looking guy, one of my best friends.' He was Carl Sparacino, and he had got on the wrong side of the mob, holding up and robbing their organized dice games. He led a group of two-bit mobsters, including Louie and Al Leffredo and Dominick Carlucci, who had hit a number of games including one operated by Andy Ercolino, at his home in Borough Park, Brooklyn, on March 28th., 1943. So Ernie gets the contract, which pays him $500, and he and the target go off one night in Sparacino's car, and Ernie shoots him four times. But as usual, in Ernie's case, the heart was willing, but the aim was weak. The victim survived long enough to finger Rupolo, and he is arrested, tried, convicted and it looks like he is going off for another long prison spell again And this is when it gets really interesting. <br /> <br /> In prison, on his second botched shooting, Ernie Rupolo decided to reveal his role in the Gallo shooting and the details behind the killing of Boccia, in the hopes it might work towards mitigating his sentence. Here he was back in jail yet again, leaving his wife behind at their home at 1947 65th. Street, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. No doubt he was broke as usual. As in the Gallo shooting, the mob bosses had assured Ernie that he would only serve short time for the Sparacino hit, and as usual they were wrong. Facing another long session of jail time, forty to eighty years as a second offender, lacking any confidence in the promises of the guys who always seemed to promise but not deliver, Ernie probably thought, what did he have to lose?<br /> <br /> Since in the absence of physical proof, New York State laws required corroborating witnesses in the planning and carrying out of crime, Ernie's statement in itself was not enough, but he came up with the name of Peter LaTempa, who under pressure, reluctantly confirmed Rupolo's story.<br /> <br /> One of the reasons both men may have agreed to testify, was that the prime target of the murder inquiry, Vito Genovese, was no longer in America, and the authorities had no idea where he was.<br /> <br /> In fact, where he was, was Naples, Italy. He had gone there in 1937, hefting a suitcase packed with $750,000, at least according to his wife, Anna. He had decided to disappear when District Attorney Thomas Dewey had started a probe into the murder of Boccia on December 1st., 1937, as part of an intensive investigation into Genovese and his associates. Dewey had successfully prosecuted Luciano, who had been sent to prison for 30 odd years, and the DA's office was now after the second tier management of the crime family. Vito takes a powder until things cool down. The family business is left in the capable hands of Frank Costello, a.k.a. 'The Prime Minister,' and things are cool until 'The Hawk' starts stirring up the pond with his tales of death and deceit.<br /> <br /> Among the various titbits of information that emanated from Ernie, was one concerning the mob itself. According to Turkus and Feder in their book Murder Inc., Rupolo confirmed that Genovese was a national power in what he referred to as the Unione Siciliano, an organization, Ernie claimed that was the self-appointed successor to the Mafia. Ernie had been involved with the crime family of Genovese for at least twelve or thirteen years, so it is interesting to speculate on what he had to say. He also confirmed the legend of the Night of the Italian Vespers, the so-called mass killings of the old moustached Petes of the American Mafia, across America, following the murder of Salvatore Maranzano in 1931, but that one has, I think, been firmly put to bed as an old-wives tale. The other myth about the Unione, continues to be debated to this day, but it seems safe to assume that it's fiction based on fantasy as well. Like most of the guys at his level in gangland, Ernie heard gossip, but rarely the true facts about anything. <br /> <br /> Ernie started talking to the DA's office, initially with A.D.A. Edward A. Hefferman, on June 13th., 1944. He first gave up the three men involved in the dice game stick-up, the Leffredo brothers and Dominick Carlucci, then started verbalizing about the Boccia case. The man who would be largely responsible for trying to put together a case against Genovese and his accomplices in the Boccia killing, was Assistant District Attorney Julius Helfand, the city lawyer who would gain notoriety as one of the leaders in the investigation into the New York Police Department corruption probe involving bookmaker Harry Gross, in 1950.<br /> <br /> It was Helfand's probing that finally surfaced LaTempa as another independent witness to the events that night in the coffee shop on Metropolitan Avenue. It is interesting that the DA's office thought he was a suitable candidate for this role. Under New York Law, in order to obtain a conviction, it is necessary to secure a second witness who had nothing to do with the commission of the crime. Clearly, Petie Spatz did not fall within that category; he was in fact an accessory or accomplice to the crime. There were however, eleven other witness to the murder, but none were ever called to fill that role. Nevertheless, with Ernie's testimony identifying Genovese as the man behind the hits on Gallo and Boccia, and Petie Spatz to back it up, Helfand seemed sure he had a way to go. Subsequently, a Brooklyn Grand Jury indicted Genovese, Miranda and four others, De Feo, Smurra, Frasca and Sal Zappola for the killing of 'The Shadow.' <br /> <br /> The problem was Vito was still incommunicado, and then, wham, like a miracle, two months later, who should come out of the woodwork, but the man himself. On August 22nd ., he was arrested in Naples, Italy, on charges of running a black market ring. It was another nine months before the maze of official red tape could be untangled enough for extradition proceedings to begin, and he was escorted back to New York to face trial. But by then, the case against him had gone out of the window. LaTempa had been taking pain-killers to relieve his distress from gallstone problems. On January 15th., 1945, in his cell at the Brooklyn Civil Prison, he had his usual dose, and dropped dead. An autopsy disclosed he had taken enough poison to kill eight horses. Vito Genovese docked in New York aboard the S.S. James Lykes, on June 1st.<br /> <br /> For him, summer had indeed arrived early.<br /> <br /> When he finally came to trial on Thursday, June 5th. 1946, in the King's County Courthouse, in Brooklyn, it was almost a foregone conclusion he would beat the rap. Four days after the trial opened, a bullet riddled body was found in underbrush off Highway 303, about fifteen miles north of the George Washington bridge. It was identified as Jerry Esposito, a thirty-five year old criminal, recently paroled from Elmira Reformatory, 200 miles north-west of New York City. He was scheduled to appear as a witness in the case against Genovese. For the Mafia boss, it was another loose end safely disposed of. On June 11th., Judge Leibowitz, after having studied the evidence and law governing the area of corroborating testimony, dismissed the case against Genovese. <br /> <br /> In his closing comments, the judge said:<br /> <br /> 'I cannot speak for the jury, but I believe if there were even a shred of corroborating evidence, you would have been condemned to the electric chair. By devious means, among which were the terrorizing of witnesses, kidnapping them, yes, even murdering those who would give evidence against you, you have thwarted justice time and time again.'<br /> <br /> Genovese smirked, and walked out of the courtroom. He must have felt immune from the law by now.<br /> <br /> Earlier, during trial proceedings, Judge Leibowitz questioned Ernie at one time:<br /> <br /> 'What was your occupation?' he asked.<br /> <br /> 'I was a gambler,' Ernie said.<br /> <br /> 'And a killer?' queried the judge.<br /> <br /> 'Oh, sure,' 'The Hawk' confirmed.<br /> <br /> On September 23rd., 1949, Rupolo because of his testimony and cooperation, was released from Dannemora Prison in accordance with the promises made by the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, and went back into the jungle. And for some strange reason, Ernie was allowed to live. One account says that the bosses sat down and agreed that he had given up plenty of years, and for that he got a reprieve, or as they call it in the mob, a pass. Willie Rupoli claimed in later years that Michele Miranda, now a very powerful member of the Genovese family administration, had said to his brother, 'Take care of yourself, kid. Don't worry about nothin. If you need anything, come to me.'<br /> <br /> There is another scenario as reported by newspaper reporter Ed Newman of the New York Journal-American. He claimed that while having a drink with Ernie in a Borough Park tavern one day, he questioned why Ernie was still alive and well. 'Whatta you mean? Ernie asked, 'you mean when I testified against Vito. He beat the rap didn’t he? The other guys got off the hook too, didn’t they?' He looked slyly at the reporter out of his good eye and added: 'Don't you know I did Vito a big favour. A man can't be tried twice for the same murder.'<br /> <br /> And so, Ernie Rupolo, big time gangster who couldn’t shoot straight, faded into the obscurity of the naked city, with its eight million stories. He operated as a shylock and a bookmaker, and made up his income by muscling in on bars and whatever other opportunities presented themselves. Sometime by 1957, he had left his wife and moved in with another woman, a big, brassy, loud-mouthed babe with a hair-trigger temper called Eleanor. His pet name for her, was 'My Heaven.' Maybe she reminded him of the Popsicle he was with the night he became one-eyed Ernie, all those years ago.<br /> <br /> They had a baby girl they called Ellen, and according to Eleanor's later testimony, seemed to spend an awful lot of time moving from one apartment to another across Brooklyn. His relationship with Eleanor was less than placid, and six, seven times a year she would kick him out. Perhaps during this period, Ernie was still carrying out work for the Genovese family, if so he must have either improved his marksmanship, or developed a much more circumspect profile, because as best as I can figure, he did not appear again in any major police investigations, until the final one.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236989083,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />He was last seen alive early in August, 1964 (photo right). Six months before he disappeared he had told his de facto wife that he knew he was going to get killed. 'Honey,' he said, 'there gonna kill me. Eleanor recounted a strange tale about Ernie having papers that another woman was holding in her safe. '<br /> <br /> ‘They will never do anything to me because I've got these papers,' he would say. 'Then all of a sudden, the stuff she's holding for about eight years is gone. And two weeks later, so was Ernie.'<br /> <br /> At the time he was killed, having been kicked out yet again by Eleanor, he was living in an apartment that belonged to his best friend, Roy Roy, on Berkley Place, just off the Grand Army Plaza, west of Prospect Park, Brooklyn. He made his last visit to Eleanor on Friday, the last day in July. He spoke to her by telephone on the Sunday night, and that was the last time she ever heard from him. Both she and Ernie's brother Willie, were convinced that Ernie was set up by his best friend Roy Roy. 'That's what they do,' Willie said, ' they take your best friend, and he has to do what they say, even if he is your best friend. Roy Roy had to be the one.'<br /> <br /> The murder of Ernie 'The Hawk' Rupolo would probably have been just another unsolved gangland killing, one of the hundreds that have littered the New York crime scene since the turn of the twentieth century, except for four men who got themselves arrested in October, 1965 for bank robbery. They would be the focus of a murder inquiry that would take almost two years before it came to trial. The man they would finger as the force behind the hit on Ernie Rupolo, the man they claimed was their boss, was a top echelon mobster in one of the five Mafia crime families that dominated New York's underworld. This group was led by Joseph Colombo, and his right-hand and obvious successor, was one of the toughest gangsters ever, John 'Sonny' Franzese.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:left;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236988694,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Born in Naples in 1919, he was one of eighteen children, and grew up in Brooklyn, working as a youth for his father, who owned and operated a bakery. ’Carmine the Lion’ Franzese was a feared member of the mob, and legend has it that he disposed of his victims by converting them to dust in his bakery oven. By the time he was thirty, John Franzese (left) was a soldier in the Mafia family, then run by Joseph Profaci. He was sponsored into it by a capo, Sebastian Aloi, and quickly rose to a position of power following the promotion to the boss position of Joe Colombo at the death of Profaci. One of the bank robbers who would later finger Franzese, claimed he was so powerful that an FBI agent had let slip that 'J. Edgar Hoover would give his left nut for Sonny Franzese.'<br /> <br /> But why would a senior member of the Colombo family get himself involved in the killing of an insignificant artisan like Ernie Rupolo? Surely there were plenty of killers in the Genovese family that could have eliminated 'The Hawk' if that was the wish of Vito Genovese, as he languished in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, serving out a sentence for drug trafficking. Searching for the truth in matters of the mob is often like trying to eat spaghetti with chopsticks, possible, but most times, too exhausting to contemplate. In the case of Ernie's whack-out, perhaps the truth was a lot more simple. Brother Willie probably put the finger on it.<br /> <br /> 'I don't think Genovese had a thing to do with killing my brother,' he said. 'You see, Ernie knew Sonny from when they were kids. And he hated him. The reason, he said, "While I was away doing sixteen years that bastard was out making money." Sonny never did a day, so Ernie figured Sonny was reaping the harvest while he was away doing time. They hated each other. They really, really did. Also, I think Ernie was stepping on Sonny's feet. Ernie couldn’t make money in Brooklyn anymore and he needed money and he figured he'd go out into Queens and start in Queens in whatever Sonny was doing-bookmaking, muscling in on bars, whatever. And Sonny didn’t want that.' <br /> <br /> So rather than an act of revenge on a man who had the temerity to expose a mob boss for what he was, the hit on Ernie Rupolo was simply an act of housekeeping, clearing the streets of an inconvenience. <br /> <br /> On November 2nd., 1967, the trial to determine the guilt or innocence of the men accused of the murder of Ernest Rupolo, began in the Queens County courthouse. It was the first time in twenty years that a murder trial involving the Mafia had come before the courts in New York. The defendants were, John Franzese, Joseph 'Whitey' Florio, William 'Red' Crabbe and Thomas Matteo. There was a fifth defendant, the chauffeur and bodyguard of Franzese, a man called John Matera, but he was not in court, as he was serving time in a Florida jail, for armed robbery.<br /> <br /> The main witnesses for the prosecution were, Charlie Zaher, Richie Parks, Jimmy Smith and John Cordero, all members of a robbery team that specialized in hitting banks in Queens and Brooklyn. Cordero, was now the live-in boyfriend of Eleanor, the ex-de facto wife of Rupolo. It was her hair-trigger temper and rumbustious nature that triggered off the events that led to all these people being gathered in the courtroom on this day in the first place. <br /> <br /> In July 1965, Eleanor went drinking with her new boyfriend, John Cordero, in a bar in Queens called the Kew Motor Inn, frequented by the mob. She started bad-mouthing Joe Florio, who was a soldier in the crew led by Franzese, accusing him of being the murderer of Ernie. Cordero hustled her out, and in the car park, an altercation developed and shots were fired, Florio disappeared, and Eleanor and Cordero were picked up by Charlie Zaher, a friend of Cordero, who drove them away. <br /> <br /> The next night, 'Sony' Franzese called a 'sit-down' at another mob hangout, the Aqueduct Motel. He called into the meeting, Cordero, Zaher and Florio, who testified as to what had happened at the bar. Cordero and Zaher were allegedly part of the gang that Sonny supervised, who specialized in robbing banks. Apparently, during this rendezvous, Franzese made a number of incriminating remarks linking himself to the murder of Rupolo. And that became the heart of the case that the Assistant District Attorney for Queens, James Mosley, began to build, to indict Franzese and his gang of four for the murder of Ernest Rupolo. When Cordero and his group were arrested in connection with the bank robberies, they had not only implicated Franzese in that one, they also dragged him into the killing of 'The Hawk.''<br /> <br /> The four bank robbers had originally offered up as the sacrificial lamb for their cause, one Tony Polisi, who was arrested, tried and convicted. However, that didn't get them quite the reduction in sentence they were looking for, so their next gambit was Franzese. On the basis of their evidence, he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit bank robbery. Although every man and his dog was adamant Franzese would never be mixed up in something like this, the government tried the case, the robbers testified and Franzese was found guilty and sentenced by Judge Jacob Mishler to fifty years in prison. Sonny was out on bail, pending an appeal when he was arrested and charged with ordering the hit on Rupolo.<br /> <br /> According to evidence presented at trial, from the chief witness, Ritchie Parks, the four defendants, John Florio et al. arrived at a car park behind the Skyway Motel, in Queens, at about 2 a.m. in a car. They pulled Ernie's body out of the trunk, and as they were transferring it into the rear of another car, this one previously stolen by Parks, Ernie apparently came back to life, screaming 'No!' 'No!'<br /> <br /> Red Crabbe snatched a knife from Florio's hand, knelt over the body and repeatedly stabbed it in the chest. Finally dead, The Hawk was bundled into the stolen car and three of the men, Matera, Crabbe and Thomas Matteo drove off into the night, to dispose of the body.<br /> <br /> The way Willie Ruppoli, Ernie's brother, saw it, the killing was set up by Roy Roy, Ernie's best friend. Roy Roy may have been at this time, part of the Joey Gallo crew, over in Red Hook, along with Kid Blast, Bobby Boriello, Tony Bernardo and Louis Hubela, among others. Ernie had hung around with these guys, off and on for years, and had in fact at one time been arrested along with them. Roy Roy had a cafe on President Street, which was the ‘hang-out‘ spot for Joey Gallo and his crew .<br /> <br /> Willie said his brother was conned into the killing zone. 'That's what they do,' he claimed. 'They take your best friend....and they make him walk you into something.....wine and dine you first, then walk you into it. Roy Roy had to be the one."<br /> <br /> Maybe Willie wasn't such a mob groupie after all. <br /> <br /> More than likely, Roy Roy had driven Ernie to the Aqueduct Motor Inn, in Queens, owned by Polisi, another member of Franzese's crew, and the hit had gone down there, before Ernie's body was transferred to the getaway car. Franzese used this motel for meetings with his men, so it's logical to assume that is where they would take him.<br /> <br /> To paraphrase a saying of a famous New York cop, 'When you live in the sewers, you don't mix with bishops.' Franzese was less than fortunate, not only operating in the sewers, but cohabiting with some of the worse kind of low lives imaginable. Although he would go down on the robbery conviction, entering a federal prison in 1970, he and his co-defendants were acquitted on the Rupolo charge after a four week trial. Sonny would be back with his wife and family in their Long Island home for Christmas. With the best will in the world, D.A. Mosley was pushing it up a hill, trying to convince the jury on the evidence of a bunch of shiftless drug addicts and scum bags that made up the thrust of his case. He was also badly handicapped by a judge who bent over backwards to help the defence.<br /> <br /> I have no idea what became of three of the principal witnesses for the prosecution. On the basis of their backgrounds, they are probably dead or serving time in prison.<br /> <br /> Crabbe, Florio and Matteo have disappeared into oblivion. Johnny Matera was listed as a soldier in the Colombo Family as recently as 1988. However, some sources indicate that Johnny 'Irish' stayed on in Florida following his robbery case, and based himself in Fort Lauderdale. He subsequently became a capo in the Colombo Family, following the death of Nicholas 'Jiggs' Forlano, of a heart attack at a racecourse, in 1977.<br /> <br /> A few years later, goes another scenario, Johnny was possibly killed by the Colombos for a major breach of mob protocol. He had flown up to New York to attend a meeting with the family boss, Carmine Persico, at a house on Long Island, and failed to notice he was being tailed by FBI agents. As a result, Persico was arrested for violation of probation conditions, and imprisoned. Matera disappeared in June 1980, and is presumed dead. The Broward Sheriff's Office claims his body was cut up and buried at sea by Bert Christie, a Jewish bodybuilder and gym owner.<br /> <br /> So as so often in the convoluted world of the hoodlum, there's always money to be paid, and choices to be made.<br /> <br /> John 'Sonny' Franzese is now over ninety, not only still active in mob affairs, but back in prison yet again on another parole violation. He has been in and out of jail a half a dozen times since 1970, but is apparently still fit, and tough and just as dangerous as he was all those years ago.<br /> <br /> If she is still alive, Eleanor Rupolo/Cordero will now be well into her seventies. Perhaps she is holding on to her memories, somewhere in Queens or Brooklyn, of the one-eyed gunman who couldn't shoot straight, or maybe waiting for her latest paramour to return from the lock-up.<br /> <br /> And Ernie, The Hawk?<br /> <br /> In 1931, Ernie was a good looking kid, and the world was his oyster. Then, it all changed with that shot to his eye. From then on, he stumbled through life like a blind roofer. When he died, he was burnt-out, old before his time, and, as usual, so broke, he had to clothe himself in someone else's threads. Maybe he is wandering around in the gangster's afterlife, searching desperately for someone with a roscoe that works, and a target that will just accept the slugs and then lie down like all good victims are supposed to, so Ernie can spend the rest of eternity dreaming of being the boss of the Mafia.<br /> </p>
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The Disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-disappearance-of-jimmy
2010-11-17T13:30:00.000Z
2010-11-17T13:30:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}9236983665,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236983665,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="9236983665?profile=original" width="491" /></a>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> Missing Person #75-3425.<br /> <br /> To paraphrase that famous line from The Scarlet Pimpernel, 'they seek him here, they seek him there, trouble is, Jimmy’s buried everywhere.'<br /> <br /> There never really was any serious doubt about why he was killed. There is somewhat less doubt about who was behind the killing. The thing that has really perplexed investigators, and not unnaturally his family and friends, is what happened to the body? He was questionably, the most famous trade unionist in American history, certainly one of the most contentious, and thirty-three years after his alleged death, he's still a pain in the proverbial.<br /> <br /> His name was James Riddle Hoffa, and his mysterious disappearance in July 1975, triggered off one of the most intensive investigations in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Their inquiry generated thousands of leads and over 16000 pages of documents. In the last fifteen years, the FBI has added more than 500 new pages to its Hoffa file.<br /> <br /> It is generally believed that Hoffa was killed by the mob because he wanted to make a come-back and recapture the presidency of the biggest union in America, a position he had relinquished when he was sent to prison in 1967, after being convicted of fraud and jury tampering. His comeback was something the mob did not want, and organized things accordingly.<br /> <br /> Hoffa’s rise to power in The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, was as relentless as a steam roller.<br /> <br /> He was born in Brazil, Indiana on St. Valentine’s Day, 1913. In 1924, his widowed mother moved her family, Jimmy, a brother, and two sisters to Detroit. Quitting school at 14, Jimmy started work as a stock boy with Frank and Cedar Dry Goods and General Merchandising. From there, he moved to a job as a loader at the Kroger Food Company, in 1932. In 1936, fired from Kroger because of his rabble-rousing, he became a joint council organizer for Local 299, part of the Detroit Teamsters Joint Council 43. It was the start of a tumultuous career in the union field.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:left;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236984257,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />He was often jailed for his union work and harassed by management thugs, as the bosses saw him as a growing threat to their control of labour. He transformed Local 299 into a regional powerhouse, building up its membership to 15000. By 1942, Jimmy Hoffa (photo left) was president of Detroit Joint Council 43, and he was also linked into the Mafia.<br /> <br /> According to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), Detroit, after the end of the second world war, was a primary point in the drug importation chain, feeding into the rest of America, and in particular, New York, the biggest market for illicit drugs.<br /> <br /> Heroin, was routed from Sicily, via Marseilles, by an organization headed by Frank 'Frankie Four Fingers' Coppola and Salvatore 'Toto' Vitale, who became closely connected to Hoffa. The two men were both powerful figures in the Detroit Mafia, before Frank's deportation back to Italy and Vitale's disappearance in 1956. He may have been murdered and his body buried in a California vineyard. According to Charles Siragusa of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, he was killed by Johnny Priziola and Raffaele Quasarano over a dispute involving payment on a heroin delivery. <br /> <br /> Interesting footnote: Vitale was the grandfather of 'Good Looking Sal' Vitale the ex underboss of the Bonanno family and mob informant.<br /> <br /> The drugs they organized, were shipped into Detroit under the control of Johnny Priziola, who succeeded Coppola as the Detroit head of the Sicilian Partinico Mafia family in Detroit, and Raffaele Quasarano, aka Jimmy Q, the son-in-law of VitoVitale, of Sicily, another major drug dealer, but one who never made it into America, and stored in fish markets run by Peter Tocco, who was the son-in-law of Priziola, having married his daughter Ninette.<br /> <br /> He also happened to be the nephew of Angelo Meli, a Detroit mobster with close ties to the old Purple Gang and the New York Mafia families. The FBN suspected that Meli was another major link in the Detroit-New York drug chain, working closely with Frank “Cheech” Livorsi, Long Island based, whose daughter Dolores was married to Meli’s son, Sam. Another daughter Rosemary was married to Tommmy Dio, brother of Johhny Dio a powerful figure in the Luchese family in New York, some of the biggest drug dealers in America.<br /> <br /> Livorsi, a soldier in the crime family of Charlie Luciano, headed up a company in New York, based at 19 Rector Street, in Lower Manhattan, that was involved in a massive black market sugar deal, just after the end of World War Two, that grossed $6 million, an enormous amount of money in those days. One of his in-laws, John Ormento, a capo in the Luchese family, ran trucking companies that were used to ship the drugs from Detroit to New York, and his son, Thomas, was married to Livorsi's daughter Patricia.<br /> <br /> These people really knew how to network. Family wise that is. Their genealogical links are more complicated than a Braille version of Rubik's Cube, but help to illustrate the way the 'old' mob glued themselves together through blood ties, thus minimizing the risk of danger caused by informants.<br /> <br /> In 1945, Angelo Meli’s niece married William Buffalino, a cousin of Russel Buffalino, who was then underboss of the Mafia crime family centred in Pittston, Pennsylvania, and headed by Joseph Barbara. He of course, would make world headlines when he hosted the infamous Apalachin mob convention in 1957. Russel Buffalino, often referred to as 'The Quiet Don,' may also have been involved in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. He was certainly on the suspect list of the FBI.<br /> <br /> By the end of the second world war, the Mafia drug traffickers of Detroit were expanding into other activities, including juke boxes, cigarette smuggling and gaming machines. Hoffa’s Local 299 financed the re-establishment of a dormant Local, 985, a garage worker’s union, which once up and running, moved into the gaming machine business. Hoffa’s wife was placed on the company payroll, but under her maiden name, Josephine Poszywak.<br /> <br /> Through his relationship with the Detroit underworld, Jimmy Hoffa became acquainted with the New York mob, in particular Frank Livorsi and his biological family, which included Thomas and Johnny Diourgardi and their uncle, James “Jimmy Doyle” Plumeri, a tight-knit clan, who were all connected directly into the Mafia crime family run by Gaetano Gagliano and Tommy Luchese.<br /> <br /> Livorsi was also close to Frank Coppola, who had a mistress at one time in Detroit called Fay Tavolacci. Frank got the heave from the United States in September 1948, but continued in the drug business in Italy, operating what the Federal Bureau of Narcotics referred to as 'the Mafia second line.'<br /> <br /> Hoffa’s earlier links to the underworld in Detroit had come about through his relationship with a woman he had known, called Sylvia Pagano who had a clerical job with a union. They had carried on a relationship prior to Hoffa’s marriage.<br /> <br /> Sylvia moved to Kansas City in 1934 and married a man who was called Sam Scaradino, who was a driver/bodyguard for a local mobster. Scaradino subsequently changed his name for some reason, to O’Brien. Sylvia had a child, a boy called Charles, by a previous relationship, who also adopted this new name.<br /> <br /> When Scaradino died, Frank Coppola met up with Sylvia and became the boy’s godfather. It was through Sylvia in fact that Hoffa met Coppola, and made his connection into the Detroit underworld. In due course, after Coppola disappeared from Sylvia’s life, Hoffa informally adopted Charles known generally as “Chuckie,” making him a foster son. He and his mother actually moved in with Hoffa and his wife, living in a kind of extended family situation for a number of years. It was not that unusual, as Hoffa's wife Josephine, and Sylvia were old friends, who had walked picket lines together back in the 1930s.<br /> <br /> However, adopting Chuckie may have been the worst decision Hoffa ever made in his life.<br /> <br /> Sylvia Pagano also introduced Hoffa to Maurice “Moe” Dalitz, a close associate of Detroit’s Purple Gang, and a man who would become a major player in Las Vegas, where the Teamster’s would invest a lot of money in the years to come. Sylvia was also linked into another mobster who would have a big influence on the events as they unfolded down the years. By the early 1960s, although re-married to a man called John Paris, an executive in the laundry industry, Sylvia Pagano Paris was having an affair with Anthony Giacalone, a former numbers runner for Detroit mobster Peter Licavoli, and an enforcer for Joe Zerilli, aka 'Joe Uno', undisputed head of the Detroit mob and William 'Black Bill' Tocco, his brother-in-law and perhaps the de-facto underboss. Sylvia was made to report on Hoffa's activities back to Giacalone, who was not only close to another man who was to play a big part in the Hoffa story, Anthony Provenzano, he was also his brother-in-law.<br /> <br /> Yet more Mafia related blood-ties.<br /> <br /> In 1952, Dave Beck was appointed head of the Teamsters, and Jimmy Hoffa was given an IBT vie-presidency and a seat on the Teamsters’ general executive board. In due course, Dave Beck, like so many other Teamster presidents, would go to jail, in his case for embezzlement. In 1956, Hoffa used his connections to Johnny Dioguardi to gain control of the New York IBT locals though the illegal creation of 'paper locals,' in New York city. Passing control of these non-existing locals into the management of Dioguardi’s associates, Hoffa was able to engineer the take-over of the city’s Joint Council 16.<br /> <br /> How organized crime gained control over Hoffa remains a matter of conjecture, even among those people who were close to him at the time. He perhaps, began his unholy alliance in order to obtain 'mob muscle' to fight management in the rough and tumble years of the Teamsters organizational drives of 1930s and 1940s, and then, seduced by the power he'd created for himself, kept close to the hoodlums who for favours rendered, would guarantee him support and through that, the continuation of the hegemony he'd generated. His status in the union movement of America was not unlike that of the Christian Democratic Party of Italy in the post war years. Both Hoffa and the CD needed Mafia clout to engender votes, and maintain their survival.<br /> <br /> In 1957, at the IBT annual convention held in Miami Beach, Florida, James Hoffa was elected General President of the Teamsters. In the next ten years he would work relentlessly, developing not only the union’s, but his own image, as hard driving, successful entities. Many of the rank and file looked on Hoffa as a legend in his own lifetime, the man who had made their union one of the most influential America has ever seen. As the president, in 1964, he negotiated the first ever-industry wide contract, the National Master Freight Agreement.<br /> <br /> In that same year, he was convicted in a federal court in Chattanooga for tampering with a jury, and was sentenced to eight years in prison. On May 11, 1964, he was also found guilty on further charges of fraud and conspiracy, getting a further five years.<br /> <br /> On March 6th., 1967, all his appeals exhausted, Jimmy Hoffa was assigned to serve his sentence at Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.<br /> <br /> There were a number of organized crime figures doing time here, including Carmine Galante, the fearsome mob boss from the Bonanno family, Anthony 'Tough Tony' De Angelis, perpetrator of the great salad oil swindle of the 1960s that almost destroyed the American Express Company, and Anthony Provenzano, a caporegime in the New Jersey faction of the Genovese family, who was serving time for extortion.<br /> <br /> Although Galante befriended Hoffa, Jimmy had little time for Provenzano. According to inmate Eddy Edwards, bank robber, escape artist and former headliner on the FBI's 'Ten Mosted Wanted' list, Hoffa once told him '.......that guy Provenzano is nuts.' In August 1967, in the prison mess hall, the two men came to blows. As they were separated, Provenzano was apparently heard screaming, ' ...... old man! Yours is coming! You know it's coming one of these days.....You're going to belong to me!'<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236984461,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Anthony Provenzano (right), most often referred to as 'Tony Pro,' had been part of the Teamsters for many years. Between 1948 and 1958, he was a business agent there, and in 1958 became president of Union City's Local 560, a position he held for the next ten years, before moving up to be president of New Jersey's Joint Council, and then to IBT vice president.<br /> <br /> Local 560 was one of the biggest in America with over 10,000 members representing over 425 companies. It was also listed by the Justice Department as the most corrupt. Tony along with his brothers, Sal, Nunzio and Angelo, were all deeply involved in the labor movement, certainly not out of altruistic inclinations, but more for what they could screw out of the organization for themselves and the patron saint of their underworld endeavours, the Genovese crime family, often referred to as 'The West Side Mob,' into which 'Tony Pro' was inducted, sometime in the early 1960s. For almost twenty years 'Tony Pro' ran Local 560 with the proverbial fist of iron, wielded in his absence, by his brothers.<br /> <br /> Anthony Provenzano had risen in the mob with the help and support of Anthony Strollo, also known in the underworld as 'Tony Bender,' himself a close associate of Vito Genovese. Bender and Provenzano grew up together on the same street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and when Bender moved his base to New Jersey to take control of the waterfront, among other things, 'Tony Pro' saw an opening and went with him. Both men were allegedly involved in criminal activities on the wharves, and may well have been into drug trafficking.<br /> <br /> With Bender's clout and Provenzano's contact with truckers, it would seem to have been a perfect combination. Access to well controlled transportation was a vital ingredient in the drug business. It was no coincidence that when Vito Genovese went down on his drug bust in 1958, Big John Ormento of the Luchese family, who ran O & S Trucking Company and Long Island Garment Trucking Company, was right there with him.<br /> <br /> Anthony Provenzano's power was so absolute that throughout the Eastern Seaboard, few contracts were signed, pension fund dollars invested, or major grievances arbitrated without his input. The Teamster’s offices at Local 560 in Union City operated not only as a union headquarters, but also as a base for loan sharking, counterfeiting, sports betting and many other crimes, including contract killings. The men who reported to Anthony Provenzano were believed responsible for many mob murders.<br /> <br /> Provenzano operated as a 'skipper' or crew boss for the Genovese Family in Northern New Jersey.<br /> <br /> Members of his team included his brother Nunzio, the Andretta brothers, Stephen and Thomas, Gabriel and Salvatore Briguglio, Salvatore Sinno, Harold Konigsberg, Armand Faugno, Ralph Picardo, Ralph Pellecchia and Frederick Furino. The crew operated illegal Monte card games in New York and Hoboken and in Jersey City, in addition to their other criminal activities.<br /> <br /> The building, at 7070 Summit Avenue that housed the headquarters of Local 560, almost proved to be a death trap for Provenzano himself, on one occasion.<br /> <br /> On a Sunday morning, June 24th., 1962, he was found injured and unconscious on the floor of the building's elevator shaft. Taken to hospital with injuries that included six broken ribs, he told police had gone to the office to do some paper work and tend to his racing pigeons (a sport beloved of mobsters for some reason,) which he kept on the roof of the building, and had accidentally fallen into the shaft. Fifteen years later, a criminal associate claimed he had pushed Tony into the elevator opening. It was seemingly over a heroin deal that had gone bad.<br /> <br /> Provenzano, ever the resourceful mobster, claimed the fall an accident, and received $17,000 in compensation. The story may or my not be true. What is more interesting, is that just a few weeks earlier, his mentor 'Tony Bender' disappeared from his Fort Lee, New Jersey home and was never seen again. Rumour has it he went on a one way trip and was murdered by Tommy Eboli, on the instructions of Vito Genovese.<br /> <br /> Was Provenzano's 'accident' in some way connected to this?<br /> <br /> Provenzano's grip on Local 560 was unassailable. In 1962, his official salary was $20,000. A year later it had increased to $95,000. Along with stipends from his post at the Joint Council 73, and as vice president of the Teamsters, he was earning over $113,000. More than Hoffa earned as leader of the union. Using the consumer price index as a measure, that's $800,000 by today's standard.<br /> <br /> Tony Pro may well have been, at this time, the highest paid union official in the world. He was certainly one of the most crooked.<br /> <br /> By the late 1960s, Provenzano had allied himself to Frank Fitzsimmons, the man who took over control of the Teamsters when Hoffa went off to prison. The two men became good friends, socializing to the extent that they often travelled the country, playing golf together.<br /> <br /> Hoffa obviously hated the thought that a man as powerful as Provenzano was backing a man who Jimmy obviously thought of as a temporary back-stop for the job of running the Teamsters, until such times as he himself, could regain control. At a Teamster’s convention held in Miami in the early 1970s, after both Provenzano and Hoffa had been released from prison, the two men had another go at each other. According to Dan Sullivan, a New York teamster, Hoffa told him, 'Pro threatened to pull my guts out and kidnap my children if I attempt to return to the presidency of the Teamsters.'<br /> <br /> Jimmy Hoffa's dream to make a comeback and take over the presidency of the Teamsters, was just that, a dream, according to Michigan organized crime expert, Vincent Piersante, head of the Michigan attorney general's office.<br /> <br /> Because of the mob's tremendous influence on the Teamster’s Union, Hoffa had no chance of returning to power, unless the mob agreed. And the Mafia was not going to do that. The fact that Fitzsimmons and other top officials of the union had been in the pocket of the Mafia was almost indisputable. A new, and different relationship had developed in the union since Jimmy Hoffa had gone off to prison in 1967, and as always with the mob, it was tied into money. There were millions of dollars from the Central States Pension Fund that could be made available to the Dons to fund their schemes and help them grow bigger and more powerful, and Hoffa would not be allowed to stand between it and them.<br /> <br /> He'd made a statement on his release from prison: 'Tell the rats to get off the ship because I'm coming back.' He may have thought it was a call to arms. In essence, it was his own personal valedictory.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236984485,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />By early 1975, it appeared that Anthony 'Tony Jack' Giacalone was trying to arrange some kind of sit-down with Hoffa and Provenzano to try and resolve their differences.<br /> <br /> Married to Provenzano's cousin, Giacalone was also making the rounds of the golf courses with 'Tony Pro' and Frank Fitzsimmons. Giacalone was currently under investigation by a federal grand jury, in Detroit, for income tax fraud and extorting a Teamster’s pension plan. He would go down in June 1976 for ten years on another tax fraud case.<br /> <br /> 'Tony Jack' (right) and 'Tony Pro' were to be the key elements that on combination, created the fusible mass that led to the destruction of Jimmy Hoffa.<br /> <br /> On July 30th., 1975, Jimmy Hoffa dressed casually in a dark blue pullover shirt, blue pants, black Gucci loafers, and trademark white socks. Sometime that morning, he received a telephone call at his two storied, cottage-style summer house on Square Lake, in Bloomfield Hills, about 20 miles north of Detroit. It apparently confirmed a meeting he was waiting to hear about. He kissed his wife goodbye, and drove off at 1.15p.m. in his big, green, two-door Pontiac Grand Ville. He told his wife he was going to the Machus Red Fox restaurant, next to a shopping strip on Maple and Telegraph Roads, in Bloomfield Township.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236985055,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" /></p>
<p><br /> <br /> He had told Josephine that one of the men he was going to have lunch with was Anthony Giacalone, and that he and some other associates were waiting for him at the tony, 270 seat eating place which had been opened in December 1965, by food entrepreneur Harris O. Machus. The Red Fox (above) was one of eight restaurants and pastry shops he operated in the Detroit area. Jimmy had often used the place for dining and entertaining. It had in fact, hosted his son, James P. Hoffa's wedding reception.<br /> <br /> According to the manager of the Red Fox, Hoffa never entered the building that day. He parked his Pontiac at the north end of the restaurant's lot, and waited. At 2.30 p.m. he telephoned his wife from a hardware store, in the strip mall, behind the Red Fox, to see if Giacalone had rung in. The last legitimate sighting of Jimmy Hoffa on that day, was sometime about 2.45 p.m., still waiting in the parking lot. A real estate salesman stopped by to talk with him for a few minutes. Hoffa then disappeared off the face of the earth, falling over the edge, missing in action to this day, thirty-three years later. His family filed a missing person report with the Detroit police at 6 p.m. on July 31st., and it is still listed there as:<br /> <br /> Missing Person #75-3425<br /> <br /> So what happened to Jimmy Hoffa?<br /> <br /> Well, it's safe to assume that he probably died that day, some time.<br /> <br /> According to Rolland McMaster, a close friend and mover and shaker in the Teamsters, who had turned against Jimmy in 1967:<br /> <br /> 'Jimmy ran off to Brazil with a go-go dancer.'<br /> <br /> That would have to be one of the more fanciful interpretations of Hoffa's ultimate destination.<br /> <br /> Here are some of the others:<br /> <br /> * Mixed in concrete and now part of the Giant's Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.<br /> <br /> * Dumped into the Au Sable River in Michigan in 30 feet of water, between two dams.<br /> <br /> * Run through a mob operated fat-rendering plant that was subsequently burned down.<br /> <br /> * Buried under the helicopter pad at the Sheraton Savannah Resort Hotel.<br /> <br /> * Crushed in a steel compactor for junk cars at Central Sanitation Services, a company owned by Raffaele Quasarano in Hamtramck, East Detroit, which was destroyed by fire in 1978.<br /> <br /> * Ironically, part of the site now occupied by the Wayne County Jail.<br /> <br /> * Stuffed into a 50 gallon oil drum, and taken on a Gateway Transportation truck to the Gulf of Mexico.<br /> <br /> * Ground up into little pieces and dumped into a Florida swamp.<br /> <br /> * Buried in a field in Waterford Township.<br /> <br /> * Disposed of in the Central Waste Management trash incinerator, again at Hamtramck, owned by Peter Vitale and Raffaele Quasarano.<br /> <br /> * Buried at the bottom of a swimming pool behind a mansion in Bloomfield Hills, near Turtle Lake.<br /> <br /> * Buried under a public works garage in Cadillac, Michigan.<br /> <br /> * Dumped into a 100 acre gravel pit, owned by his brother William, near Highland. Infra- red photos were taken of the site from a military plane. No luck.<br /> <br /> * In May, 2004, authorities in Oakland County, Michigan, removed floorboards from a Detroit house and found blood stains that they thought might be linked to Jimmy. They weren't.<br /> <br /> * In 2006, the FBI spent a lot of time digging up parts of an 80 acre horse farm near Milford Township, 30 miles west of Detroit on the basis of 'strong evidence.'<br /> <br /> Squads of FBI agents fanned out across the Hidden Dreams farm outside Detroit and special agent Daniel Roberts, who lead the operation, expressed guarded optimism about solving one of modern America's greatest crime mysteries, which has endured for 30 years. "This is the best lead I've come across on the Hoffa investigation," he said. It wasn't.<br /> <br /> And my favourite. According to Johnny Carson in a monologue on his late night show, Hoffa was buried under Tammy Faye Baker's makeup.<br /> <br /> Jimmy was gone, so who killed him?<br /> <br /> The most likely suspects were a number of men working for 'Tony Pro,' who along with Tony Giacalone, had set up this meeting at the Red Fox, in order to lure Hoffa to his death. He had become just too much of an embarrassment and irritation in their desire to control the Teamster’s pension fund, and as usual, with the Mafia, when they had a problem, they simply removed it. For good. <br /> <br /> In 1985, the FBI issued a 50 page summary of the case of Jimmy Hoffa, referred to as The Hoffex Memo. In essence, it lists Chuckie O'Brien, Anthony Provenzano, Anthony Giacalone, Thomas and Stephen Andretta, Russel Buffalino (eastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York Mafia boss,) and Salvatore Briguglio and his brother Gabriel, as prime suspects in the murder.<br /> <br /> According to the bureau, Chuckie O'Brien arrived at The Red Fox lot in a borrowed car, a 1975 maroon Mercury Brougham, that belonged to Joey, son of Anthony Giacalone. He picked up his adopted father, who obviously thought they were going to a meeting with Provenzano and Giacalone senior. Instead, somewhere along the way, the car detoured to a pre-arranged spot, and Jimmy Hoffa was murdered.<br /> <br /> Remember, Chuckie's mother had been in a close relationship with Giacalone for many years, to the point that Chuckie referred to him as 'Uncle Tony.' Did a hoodlum's demands outweigh a step son's loyalty?<br /> <br /> Sniffer dogs subsequently picked up the scent of Hoffa from inside the vehicle, and years later, a DNA test on a human hair found inside the car, confirmed it was from the missing man.<br /> <br /> Of course, none of these suspects ever admitted to any involvement in the murder or disappearance of Jimmy. To my knowledge, only two men have actually confessed to the killing.<br /> <br /> Donald Frankos, an alleged hit man for the mob, stated in his biography, 'Contract Killer' that he John Sullivan, an infamous New York criminal, and Jimmy Coonan, a member of the notorious Hell's Kichen mob, who called themselves 'The Westies,' ambushed and shot Hoffa dead in a house in Mount Clemens, Macomb County, about 25 miles north-east of Detroit. Frankos claimed they cut up the body and stuffed it into a freezer in the house.<br /> <br /> <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-irishman-teamsters-boss-jimmy-hoffa-s-friend-and-the-man-who" target="_blank">Frank 'Frankie the Irishman' Sheerhan</a>, a hit man who apparently worked for Russel Buffalino, also confessed to killing Jimmy, in a death-bed confession recorded in a book called 'I heard you paint Houses.' The killing he orchestrated, went down in a house on Beaverland Street, off Seven Mile Road, in Detroit. That was the May 2004 FBI investigation which confirmed nothing at all.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-irishman-teamsters-boss-jimmy-hoffa-s-friend-and-the-man-who">The Irishman:</a> Jimmy Hoffa’s friend and the man who put two bullets in the back of his skull</strong></li>
</ul>
<p><br /> From another source, a different theory emerges about the events surrounding the lead up to the killing.<br /> <br /> Among all the claims, counter-claims, innuendoes and suppositions that surround and at times, stifle the story of Jimmy Hoffa, this one is from the horse's mouth, so to speak. To my knowledge, this information has never been published before, anywhere.<br /> <br /> Jimmy was released from prison at the end of December, 1971 following a Presidential pardon. His commutation of sentence however, barred him from any active union activities until 1980, when he would be 67 years old.<br /> <br /> By 1975 he was perhaps, facing many financial pressures. Frank Fitzsimmons who had taken over as head of the Teamsters when Hoffa went to prison, fired Josephine from her $40,000 a year job as head of the IBT women's DRIVE committee, and then Jimmy, from his $30,000 a year position as a counsellor for the IBT.<br /> <br /> Conceivably, under these strains, Jimmy Hoffa started to put pressure on many important people within the Teamster’s union and their powerful associates. Was he shaking these people down for money using as a threat, his intimate knowledge of all the skeletons in all the closets? Anthony Giacalone apparently tried to persuade Jimmy away from this course of action, without success.<br /> <br /> Provenzano would have been one of the biggest fish Jimmy would try and land, a man with plenty of secrets to hide himself, and a man that Jimmy Hoffa had little regard for. In addition to all of this, Hoffa had allied himself to Bonanno underboss Carmine Galante a fearsome man, hated by the Gambino and Genovese crime families in New York. Galante had offered friendship and protection to Jimmy when he arrived at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, and Jimmy had maintained ties with the mafioso.<br /> <br /> Somehow, Jimmy had hoped Galante would be able to help him in his struggle to regain the leadership of the Teamsters. But 'Lillo' as he was known throughout the underworld, had a basketful of his own problems to handle in 1975, and helping Jimmy was low on his priority list.<br /> <br /> Aware of Hoffa's manoeuvrings and the moves he was making, and maybe under more pressure from the rumors that 'Sally Bugs' might be going to roll-over, Anthony Provenzano visited Anthony 'Fat Tony' Salerno at his headquarters, the Palma Boys Social Club, at East 115th Street in Harlem, to seek his help in solving the problem. Salerno at this time was the consigliere or counsellor, of the Genovese Cosa Nostra family.<br /> <br /> The boss in this period was Frank Alfonso Tieri, also known as 'Funzuola,' and Salerno would need his approval and blessing to set up a hit this big.<br /> <br /> 'Fat Tony' rarely strayed from his club, except when he went home for the weekends to his luxurious horse farm in upstate New York, but it's reasonable to assume he got off his rather large ass and went somewhere to talk to 'Funzi,' either at the Rio Grande Social Club in Brooklyn, or perhaps across the Hudson to one of Tieri's favourite restaurants, Sorrentino's in Newark. Either way, the blessing came down, and Provenzano was given the okay to liaise with the men in Detroit. There is no doubt that Joe Zerilli, the Sicilian born, seventy-eight year old Don of Detroit would have had to okay the hit, and 'Tony Jack' got the word to 'go with the flow'.<br /> <br /> So what became of the other players in this complex and disturbing story?<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236985090,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Salvatore 'Sally Bugs' Briguglio (right), ostensibly a business agent for Local 560, was apparently a strong arm man for Provenzano. Although small in stature, and looking more like a civil servant or a professor, with his dark, horn-rimmed glasses and short hair, one, however with a strong New Jersey accent, he was it seems, a dangerous and very capable killer. If he did help to kill Jimmy, it wouldn't be the first time that he may have been involved in the murder of a union official.<br /> <br /> Fearing that 'Sally Bugs' might weaken under the constant police pressure during a 1978 investigation into yet more kickbacks and extortion charges in connection with the Teamsters, Tony Pro apparently arranged to reduce his exposure by having his friend and colleague removed, for good. He may well have also been disturbed by a rumour that Briguglio was talking to the FBI, feeling out their reaction to him becoming an informant. This was apparently known to agents in the Detroit office, before 'Sally Bugs' got swatted.<br /> <br /> Late in the evening of March 21st, Briguglio was blasted off his feet by five .45 calibre bullets as he stood outside Benito's Restaurant on Mulberry Street in Manhattan. Amazingly, the killing was witnessed by two NYPD Intelligence cops who were busy trailing one of Briguglio's dinner guests, Genovese capo, Mathew Ianiello, and for some reason these cops were unable or unwilling to intervene. The killers, as always, disappeared, although another eyewitness to the shooting, identified underworld figure Joe Scarborough as a potential suspect. The eye-witness, a young Chinese student, also helped to describe a getaway car used in the hit, a 1978 Lincoln Versailles, eventually traced to a small town in Georgia. Nothing developed from these investigations.<br /> <br /> There is another theory to explain the killing of 'Sally Bugs.' The day after the hit, Pasquale 'Paddy Mack' Macchiarole, a capo in the Genovese family, was murdered. His body, shot in the head multiple times, was found stuffed in the trunk of his new Cadillac alongside the Rockaway Parkway in Brooklyn. Police posited, on information they had received from an underworld source that the two men were about to make a power play to take over control of Local 560, in the event that Tony Pro would go to prison (which he did,) for the murder of union leader Anthony Castellito, the previous leader of 560, who had been murdered in Kerhonkson, Ulster County, New York, in 1961, by 'Sally Bugs' and Kayo Koningsberg, on the orders of Provenzano.<br /> <br /> Another underworld source however, indicates that 'Paddy Mack' got whacked because of his big mouth, and his habit of belittling Genovese mob boss Alphone 'Funzi' Terri.<br /> <br /> When he was questioned by the police and F.B.I., Thomas Andretta denied any knowledge of Hoffa's disappearance. He claimed he was playing gin rummy with Anthony Provenzano in the hall at Local 560, in Union City, 700 miles from where Jimmy vanished.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236985299,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Ralph 'Little Ralphie' Picardo, one time driver for Tony Pro, testified that the Briguglio brothers and Thomas Andretta (right) had personally killed Jimmy, and that they had arranged for the body to be loaded into an empty oil drum and transported out of the Detroit area on a truck belonging to the Gateway Transportation Company, but they were never indicted on this evidence. By way of supporting evidence on their aptitude for violence, he also stated that Andretta and 'Sally Bugs' had murdered a loan shark in 1972 and fed the body into a tree shredder before burying the remains under the Hackensack Bridge in Jersey City.<br /> <br /> Stephen Andretta was indicted in New Jersey on RICO charges in connection with 'labour peace' payments from trucking companies which serviced Seatrain Lines out of the port of New Jersey. On July 10th., 1979, he was sentenced to a prison term of ten years.<br /> <br /> The two Tonys eventually went down for some of the dozens of crimes they had committed over the years. In 1976, Giacalone was convicted of income tax evasion and served ten years in prison. In 1996 he was charged again, this time with racketeering, but died in February, 2001, at the age of 82, before the case was tried.<br /> <br /> Anthony Provenzano was arraigned for trial in the summer of 1978 for his involvement in the murder of Anthony Castelito. As a reward for his part in the killing, 'Tony Pro' had rewarded Salvatore Briguglio with the sinecure of business agent in Local 560. The government, on June 21st, 1978, rewarded 'Tony Pro' with life in prison, where he died aged 71, on December 12th., 1988. His conviction was the first time that the famous RICO law was applied and used to convict a member of the Mafia in America. Alphonse Tieri would subsequently become the first mob boss to be indicted under this law, but he died before his case was finalized.<br /> <br /> The Machus Red Fox at 6676 Telegraph Road, is also no more. It folded in February 1996, and was replaced by an outpost of an Italian restaurant chain called 'Andiamo's Italia West.' The former button-down premises, linked ineluctably with the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, is now a trendy Italian eating house in shades of purple and gold, a gourmet trattoria with hand-painted chandeliers and sunflower-filled urns. Instead of gangsters cutting deals, it now hosts stock brokers watching share prices on the bar television sets.<br /> <br /> However, it still has links back into the days of Jimmy H.<br /> <br /> The owner of the chain, Joe Vicarri, is the son-in-law of modern day Detroit Cosa Nostra consigliere, Anthony 'Tony T' Tocco, son of the late 'Black Bill' Tocco. And a former silent partner in the business, who died in March this year, was Vincent 'Little Vince' Meli, the nephew of that long ago underboss of the Detriot Mafia, Angelo 'The Chairman' Meli.<br /> <br /> It's hard to get away from these guys, no matter which way you turn.<br /> <br /> <img style="float:right;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}9236985490,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" />Chuckie O'Brien (photo right) left Detroit and moved to Florida, into a job provided for him by Teamster president, Frank Fitzsimmons. As of May 2006, he was living in a town house in a gated Boca Raton, Florida, community, working as a janitor at the University of Miami. Chuckie was kicked out of the union by a review board in 1990 for his connection to Detroit mobsters, including Giacalone. In 1976 he had been convicted in federal court for accepting a free car from an auto dealer. In 1978 he was convicted for lying on a loan application. He has served at least one year in prison. Now, in ill-health, he has had two cancer surgeries, a gall bladder operation and four heart by-pass operations.<br /> <br /> He has always denied being anywhere near the Red Fox that day, and driving Hoffa away in Giacalone's car.<br /> <br /> There is finally, yet another scenario we can consider in the matter of Jimmy's disappearance, and that suggests that yet another man met Jimmy that afternoon. This was Vito 'Billy Jack' Giacalone the fifty-three year old brother of 'Tony Jack.' and another good friend of Hoffa's, who may have accompanied Chuckie to that fateful meeting. Whoever was going to kill Jimmy, it's certain that Zerilli, the boss of the Detroit Mafia, would have wanted one of his senior men on the job, supervising. If that's the case, it's highly likely that Jimmy's last drive was probably a very short one, not more than say five miles.<br /> <br /> Carlo Licata, a relative of 'Black Bill' Tocco, (he'd married his daughter Grace,) was the son of Nick Licata, the right hand of mob boss Jack Dragna in Los Angeles, and a soldier in the Detroit Mafia family. He owned a house that distance from the Red Fox, at 680 Long Lake Road, not far east from the intersection of Telegraph, and there is a theory that Jimmy was taken there, and then killed by Sally Bugs, the Andretta brothers and 'Billy Jack.' The house stood back from the highway among trees, and was very secluded. An ideal place to carry out the hit. If that's the way it went down, his body would have been disposed of fairly quickly. It's standard mob procedure, no one travels 'easily' with a body in the car, so Jimmy's cadaver would have gone somewhere for burial, reasonably close, and quickly.<br /> <br /> Jimmy Hoffa would have been relaxed going to this house. He had been there many times before for similar meetings, with mobsters and union associates, so would not have been suspicious of it as the venue.<br /> <br /> For the FBI, the file remains open. Case No HQ 9-60052 has an agent assigned to it in the Detroit office. In the ten years up to 2002, it added a further 377 documents to the more than 16000 pages on file. After Hoffa vanished, the United States government went after the mob, big time. It added hundreds of agents and federal prosecutors to its roster, used wiretaps, undercover surveillance and adopted a policy of developing underworld informants on a national scale. Hoffa's disappearance led to the government's take-over of local 560 in Union City, and eventually, their investigation of all aspects of the Teamsters organization.<br /> <br /> In 1985, the FBI Special Agent in Charge, Detroit, told reporters that the bureau knew who was responsible for the murder of Hoffa. By then, he had been declared, legally dead. In June 2001, the head of the FBI's organized crime unit stated his belief that a decision would be made within two years whether or not to prosecute anyone for the murder. It hasn't happened yet.<br /> <br /> They better get a move on. There are not many people left alive, to charge.<br /> <br /> To me, the fascinating thing about Jimmy Hoffa is that as a victim of lupara bianca, the 'white death' as the Sicilian Mafia refer to dead men disappeared, he probably became a bigger brand name in his passing than he ever was in life.<br /> <br /> More than once, he said that no one would remember him ten years after he was dead. He also said 'I may have my faults, but being wrong ain't one of them.'<br /> <br /> Well he was incorrect on both points as it turned out.<br /> <br /> And then of course, there is the conspiracy theory. It's long and complicated and includes lot's of sudden deaths, and like all conspiracy theories, it feeds off its own blarney, but in essence it goes something like this:<br /> <br /> Hoffa was killed, not because he was a carbuncle on the ass of the Teamster's Union, an irritation that just wouldn't go away, but a much bigger problem than that. An integral part of a huge, intercontinental collusion to destroy Fidel Castro.<br /> <br /> William Eugene Buffalino, a hot-shot lawyer and the cousin of Russell, once said, 'Tell the FBI to look into the CIA. And tell the CIA to look into the FBI. Then you'll find the real answer to the Hoffa case.' He was referring to the Church Committee's closed hearings on the CIA/underworld plot to kill Castro.<br /> <br /> The CIA was apparently involved in a scheme, using mob muscle, expertise and men, to take out the Cuban dictator. At the top of the tree, the management committee as it where, organizing this event, were Sam Giancana, mob boss of Chicago, along with Johnny Roselli, mob gopher extraordinary, Russell Buffalino, Santo Trafficante, boss of Tampa, Florida, Joey 'Doves' Aiuppa of Chicago, Carlos Marcello the head of the Louisiana mob, and last, but not least, Jimmy Hoffa.<br /> <br /> Charles 'Chuckie' Grimaldi, a self-confessed hit-man for the Chicago Syndicate, claimed in his biography, 'Momo Giancana was hit by the CIA.'<br /> <br /> He claimed that the same man who killed the Chicago mob boss also killed Hoffa, who he claimed was the original contact between the mob and the CIA on the Castro conspiracy. Jimmy, Sam and Johnny got popped because people in high places started to worry that they might falter and become informants to this conspiracy. There's a lot more to it, but that's the bones of the intrigue.<br /> <br /> Maybe it's all linked into the hit on J.F.K., but let's not go there.<br /> <br /> If you type 'Jimmy Hoffa' into Google, you'll get almost 400,000 hits. There has been at least two movies based on his life, dozens of television references to him in all kinds of shows, at least a dozen songs that mention his name, books and articles by the score and even an acknowledgment to him in the massively popular video game 'Grand Theft Auto,' indicating that in his death and disappearance that has fascinated the world for over thirty years, he has truly transcended the generation gap.<br /> <br /> Jimmy Hoffa may be dead and buried, somewhere, but the legend of Jimmy Hoffa looks to be around for a long time to come.<br /> <br /> <span style="font-weight:bold;">Acknowledgments:</span><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><br style="font-weight:bold;" /><span style="font-weight:bold;">I would like to thank MC Scott, author, from the real Deal Forum, for his invaluable help in making sure all the Detroit ends of the story made sense, and introducing me to parts I never knew existed. Also Picasso, for pointing me in a direction that I think has never been explored before in the story of Jimmy Hoffa.</span><br /> </p>
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The Sun King of the Mafia
https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-sun-king-of-the-mafia
2010-11-10T21:08:40.000Z
2010-11-10T21:08:40.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a><br /> <br /> He could easily have been the first Mafia boss of bosses from Sicily to come to the United States, although when he hit New York, he may not yet have reached that lofty position. There were at least three men whose lives crossed his, who would have a crucial impact on the face of organized crime in America. One would try to destroy him, one would emulate him and one, acting as his missionary, would perhaps help establish the foundation for what became perhaps the greatest criminal organization in the nation's history. He was semi-illiterate, but at the height of his power, was one of the most powerful men in the kingdom of Sicily, ruling for over 25 years, helping to nurture a criminal dynasty, laying the foundation for the modernization of the Sicilian Mafia.<br /> <br /> He was Vito Cascioferro. His name is often spelt incorrectly as Cascio Ferro and sometimes even as Vito Cascio Iron. Ferro, translates into English as iron.<br /> <br /> He was born on January 22nd. Some sources say June 25th. All agree on the year-1862- maybe in the city of Palermo or in the Bisacquire province of Palermo in the small town of Sambuca Zabut ( its name changed in 1923 to Sambuca di Sicilia ). His father was a coltivatore diretto, that is, he owned a smallholding and also came from traditional tough campiere stock, the private armies retained to protect the vast estates of Western Sicily. He was a close friend and associate of a local landowner, Baron Inglese, whose holdings included the town of Bisacquino, about 80 miles south of Palermo city, not far from where Vito was born. The town is also noted as the birthplace of a particularly distinguished America, the late and much admired movie director, Frank Capra.<br /> <br /> Vito grew up into hot-headed, illiterate and rebellious youth, a natural candidate for the ranks of the brotherhood, and was a made member by his early twenties. His branch of the Mafia had perhaps grown out of an organization called the stoppaglieri or “the draughtsmen,” formed in Monreale, west of Palermo, sometime prior to 1870. His criminal resume which started in 1894, would come to include charges of participating in twenty murders, eight attempted murders, five robberies with violence, thirty-seven acts of extortion and fifty-three other offences including arson, kidnapping and threatening behaviour. And that's only the ones the law knew about. <br /> <br /> No run-of-the-mill hoodlum, he was in his youth, tall and handsome with bronze skin and dark, chestnut eyes that matched the colour of his flowing hair. He did not learn to read or write until well into his adulthood, coached and tutored by his wife, a schoolteacher in Bisacquino.<br /> </p>
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<div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Vito Cascioferro</span></div>
<p><br /> <br /> In 1893, the former mayor of Palermo, and one-time director of the Bank of Sicily, Marquis Commendatore Emanuele Notarbartolo, had been attacked while on a train journey between Caltanissetta and Palermo city. Stabbed to death, his body was flung from his carriage into a field. A powerful Mafia Don, called Raffaele Palizzolo was accused of complicity in his murder, and the plot somehow also revolved around Cascioferro. The actual killer was probably a notorious Mafioso called Giuseppe Fontana, who would reappear in connection with another highly publicized murder sixteen years later. Vito disappeared for a time, and travelled to Tunisia to avoid the heat from the police investigation.<br /> <br /> Back in Sicily, in 1899, he was again under investigation by law enforcement officials in connection with the kidnapping of a well known Palermo socialite, Baroness di Valpetrosa. Probably as a result of this, Cascioferro made the decision to once again leave Sicily and travel, this time to America. According to an intelligence report written by the Royal Carabinieri, he had a sister, Franscesca, who lived there, in New York, in an apartment above a drapery shop on 103rd. Street, in East Harlem. Vito travelled to New York from the French port of Le Havre on the SS La Champagne, embarking on September 1st. and arriving in New York on September 30th. 1901. According to the ship's manifest, he claimed to be a 'dealer' and was carrying $30. He listed his contact in New York as: 'cousin on Main Street.'<br /> <br /> There was a lot of logic in this move, at this time. Through his local power, and his many connections, Don Vito may well have been pivotal in the accord between the Sicilian Mafia and the Black Hand movement, especially in New York. Prior to him, allegiances had been between people rather than conventional groups. He may have perfected the links between different Sicilian Mafia families and the many and confusing Black Hand factions and taken it up to the next notch once he settled in America, except for the actions of a little, tough Italian-American cop who had an abiding hatred for Italian criminals. <br /> <br /> Vito soon became involved with the criminal underworld in New York, a seething, shifting mass of conflicting forces and alliances that was constantly at war. The conflict between Manhattan based Mafiosi and Brooklyn's numerous Camorra gangs, would rage off and on for nearly thirty years, culminating in what crime historians refer to as “The Castellammarese War” of 1930-31.<br /> <br /> Cascioferro linked into the loose knit coalition of Sicilian gangsters headed by Giuseppe and Nicholas Morello, working alongside Vincent and Ciro Terranova. They in turn, used as back-up, the terrifying enforcer, Ignazio Lupo, often erroneously referred to as Saietta, the brother-in-law of Giuseppe “Joe” Morello. Soon after he arrived in New York he was working with a gang of forgers and counterfeiters led by a woman named Stella Fraute, narrowly escaping arrest when she and her gang were rounded up by U.S. Secret Service agents.<br /> <br /> Vito’s future in the New York underworld may well have been assured and his continuing presence there would undoubtedly have had a notable impact on its future, except for the actions of a man, whose naivety or cupidity cost him his life, and also indirectly led to Vito Cascioferro hitting the trail again.<br /> <br /> On April 14th., 1903, a woman called Carmelina Zillo, was emptying trash onto a vacant lot at the corner of Avenue D and East 11th. Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, when she came across a barrel into which was stuffed a man who resembled chopped liver. Stabbed 17 times, his head was almost severed from the body. The corpse in the barrel became famous for a number of reasons, not the least being that it formed the basis for the first story ever produced in America about the Mafia, called, “The Barrel Mystery”, written by William J. Flynn, a Secret Service Agent, and published by McCann in 1919.<br /> <br /> The dead man was eventually identified as Benedetto Maddonnia, who had occasionally used an alias, Ben Morris, and who lived in Buffalo, New York. He had it seemed, been trying to threaten the Morello brothers over their treatment of another member of their gang, a suicidal tactic, that brought him nothing but expected trouble. Interestingly, Maddonnia was not the first mobster in New York to turn up dead in a wooden tub. In 1902, Joe Catania, a Mafia associate, was found with his throat cut, crunched up in barrel in a swimming hole, where 73rd Street met the bay in Brooklyn.<br /> <br /> The man thought to have solved the Maddonnia murder, was a short, thickset, tough and extremely aggressive NYPD officer, a lieutenant called Giuseppe “Joe” Petrosino. He headed a distinct “Italian” squad in the detective bureau, the first and only secret service unit in the force's history, and went after the Mafia and Camorra mobsters as though he was working a personal crusade to cleanse the city of Italian criminals. Through his efforts and detective work, he tracked down the killer of Maddonnia- a hulk, who also hailed from Buffalo- called Tomasso Petto, also known as “Petto the Ox.” Maddonnia had been part of a currency counterfeiting ring run by the Morello brothers; at the time he tried to screw his partners. His death and the manner in which he was delivered into it, was clearly intended to be a message to others.<br /> <br /> Although Petto was arrested, the evidence against him was not strong enough to convict, and he went free. He changed his name to Luciano Perrino, moving away from New York, and was subsequently gunned down by an unknown assailant on the door step of his home in Brownstown, Pennsylvania.<br /> <br /> The pressure Petrosino brought to bear on the barrel murder mystery and its ongoing developments involving the Morrello gang, also pointed to Don Vito as a key player in the gang. Before the police could arrest him however, he slipped out of New York, taking up residence in Brooklyn and then upped stakes and left town, moving south, and living for a time on Royal Street in New Orleans, home to one of the oldest Sicilian immigrant communities in the United States. He stayed there until embarking for Sicily on September 28th. 1904. He had been in America, exactly three years short of two days. It's tempting to try and imagine how the future shape of the American Mafia might have changed, had he stayed on.<br /> <br /> In the Crescent City, he connected in with Paul di Christina, head of the local Mafia clan that was operating under a low profile, following the murder of police chief Hennessey on Girod Street in 1890, and the subsequent public uprising and lynching of eleven Sicilian suspects suspected of participation in the assassination. Christina had been a partner in Palermo, of Francesco Matesi who went sometimes by the name of Francesco Genova, and the two had fled Sicily following their involvement in the murder of seven members of the Sienna family in 1900. Paul di Christina finished up in New Orleans, where he became a major Mafia boss until shot-gunned to death by one Pietro Pepitone, a grocer, in 1909.<br /> <br /> Cascioferro's hatred of the tough New York detective would fester on for five years, and then he would be presented with the perfect opportunity to exact revenge. According to the Royal Carabinieri, Vito always carried with him a snapshot of the American policeman, Petrosino, to remind him how much he hated the cop.<br /> </p>
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<div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Joseph Petrosino</span></div>
<p><br /> Christina, whose real name was Paulo Marchese, had arrived in America originally at the port of New York. He had likewise tangled with Petrosino, and left the city as a result, also harbouring a hatred for the courageous cop. He may have been involved in the events that subsequently unfolded in March 1909, in the capital of Sicily.<br /> <br /> By 1909, the unit New York Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham had established, a 15 man Secret Service branch of the agency, exclusively “to crush the Black Hand and Anarchists of the city,” was operating at full steam. Lieutenant Joe Petrosino persuaded Bingham to let him travel to Italy to collect accurate intelligence from his contemporaries there, about the Italian criminals who were creating so much mayhem in New York, and to also set up an espionage ring in Sicily to gather information ongoing. He may also have been researching a counterfeiting ring out of Italy which was a cause for concern of the U.S. Treasury, and linked into the New York activities of the Morrello's. It all seemed a good idea at the time and ear-marked as a highly sensitive exercise, but word of Petrosino's visit became public knowledge before he had even arrived at his destination.<br /> <br /> Early in February, 1909, he sailed for Italy, aboard the liner Duca di Genova, travelling first class, arriving in Rome on February 21st. It was a difficult passage due to the bad, winter weather. After meeting various officials in the Italian government and police departments, he travelled south to Palermo, arriving there from Naples on February 28th on a mail boat.<br /> <br /> He checked in to Weiner’s Hotel de France, room number 16, at five lire a night, registering under the name of Simone Valenti di Giudea. His attempts at camouflaging his presence were unsuccessful. His arrival in Palermo became known to his enemies before he even stepped off the boat. It would seem, from that moment on, everywhere he went, and everyone he met, was on record with the people who hated him the most. <br /> <br /> At approximately seven-thirty on the evening of Friday, March 12th. he left the hotel and sought out his usual place for an early dinner. Dressed in a black suit, and a long gray overcoat, sporting a derby and with an umbrella hooked over his arm (light rain was falling that evening), he crossed the Piazza Marina, walking from his hotel to the restaurant he had been using since his arrival.<br /> <br /> At the Café Oreto, he sat at a corner table, with his back to a wall enjoying pasta, fish, potatoes, cheese with peppers, fruit and a half-litre jug of wine. At some point in the evening, two men approached him and spoke with him. Petrosino listened and then waved them away. Soon after, he paid his bill and left the restaurant. At eight forty-five, he walked to the Piazza Marina, six hundred and sixty feet away, to catch a trolley back to his hotel, and he was standing near the base of the Garibaldi statue at the small garden, his back to the square, pissing into the bushes, when he was shot dead.<br /> <br /> According to an article in the New York Herald on Sunday, March 14th, he'd been approached at 9 p.m. by two men. They fired a number of shots at him, and as fell, he drew his own handgun, firing twice at his killers. According to a memorandum sent to Police Commissioner Bingham, from the American consul in Palermo, two men came up to Petrosino, and shot at him four times, three bullets hitting him, in his right back, puncturing both lungs, a through and through in his throat, and one into the side of his face. He died instantly. The Herald story got it wrong. Joe was unarmed, having left his Smith and Wesson revolver in his valise in the hotel room. A heavy, Belgian revolver lay near the body, one barrel discharged. Investigators assumed it had belonged to one of the gunmen.<br /> <br /> A contemporary police report published later, into Petrosino’s death, gave away an important detail that had never been previously recorded: “Petrosino was shot when, walking by the fence of the gardens, the poor detective had stopped to satisfy a corporal need.” His murder had to be seen as an act of public execution; it was a lesson, and a warning to others not to come meddling in the affairs of the Mafia. Poor Joe, his bladder bursting from the jug of wine, stops to take a leak, and gets blown out of his socks. Wanting to humiliate him, the killers, known in Sicily as sicario, hit men, choose just the right moment. The only witness, officially at least, was a seaman, Alberto Cardella, from the ship, Calabria, docked at the port, who had been waiting at the tram terminal about one hundred feet away. He ran to the scene, but Joe lay dead. The sailor saw two men run off into the darkness, heard a carriage drive away. On the ground, speckled by the gentle rain, he saw a derby and an umbrella and a gun. <br /> <br /> In Petrosino’s pockets, among letters of introduction and his notebook, was a picture postcard addressed to his wife. It read, “A kiss for you and my little girl, who has spent three weeks far from her daddy.”<br /> <br /> So who were the killers, and who was behind the hit? <br /> <br /> The Palermo police headquarters received an anonymous letter dated 13th March, from New York. It claimed that the organizers of the murder were: Giuseppe Morello, Giuseppe Fontana, Ignazio Milone, Pietro Inzerillo (who ran a bar/brothel at 260 Elizabeth Street, Manhattan, called 'Stella d'Italia,') and the two Terranova brothers, step brothers of Morello. All of these men were allegedly 'Black Handers.' The contract on Petrosino may have been handed down to them by Vito Cascioferro.<br /> <br /> One of the two gunmen may indeed have been Giuseppe Fontana, who left Sicily soon afterwards and made his way to America. An alleged member of the Villabate cosca, forty-seven year old Fontana was well known to the Palermo police department and had been arrested for criminal activities ranging from counterfeiting to murder. <br /> He was a major suspect in the murder of Emanuele Notarbartolo, the banker. Another report suggests that the killers were Giovanni Campanillo, an ex-New York based Camorra boss who'd been deported earlier in the year as a result of Petrosino's rigorous investigations, along with a friend and murderous partner, Errico Alfano. Both of these men were spotted in Palermo not long after the detectives ship had docked. <br /> <br /> To complicate things further, other accounts indicate the killers were Carlo Costantino and Antonino Passananti who had sailed for Sicily from New York, the day after Petrosino left the country. To muddy the waters a lot deeper, Costantino had in fact been one of many men arrested in the Barrel case in New York. To complicate matters more, there was another man in Palermo that night called Giuseppe Giunta, who had arrived in Palermo direct from New Orleans. He linked into Paulo Marchese back in New Orleans. So were New York and New Orleans working together to set up this contract on Petrosino?<br /> <br /> Then, what about the two men who called into the cafe while Joe was eating? They may well have been Paolo Palazzotto, who Petrosino had caused to be deported from New York for criminal activity, and Ernesto Militano, who was a local tough guy. When Joe left the diner, did they follow Joe off and off him?<br /> <br /> The one I like the best for no reason other than that he sounds really evil, is a man known as Schiffizano, so called because he was involved in the selling of blood from slaughtered animals. This man had two brothers in New York who had been investigated by Joe. A man of flagitious moods and violent nature, he may well have been a local butcher called Giovani Ruisi, and was in fact one of the few men arrested by Baldassare Ceola, the Police Commissioner of Palermo City, although like the rest, he was released for lack of hard evidence.<br /> <br /> One target, ten possible shooters, and as a bonus, Casioferro waiting in the wings. <br /> <br /> The sort of case that would have given Colombo, the television detective, a migraine just thinking about it. <br /> </p>
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<div style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Were these the killers of Joe Petrosino?</span></div>
<p><br /> In due course, the police commissioner of New York prepared a detailed report on the killing of Joe Petrosino, and nominated Constantino and Passananti as the most likely suspects. Neither man was ever tried for the crime however.<br /> <br /> William J. Flynn, head of the U.S. Secret Service, claimed that in 1911, Giuseppe Morello, imprisoned in the Atlanta Penitentiary, had confessed to him that Constantino and Passannanti had been the killers of Petrosino, acting under the orders of Vito Cascioferro.<br /> <br /> The visit to Sicily to flush out information on the Mafia was meant to be secret. On February 20th. the day before he arrived in Rome, the New York Herald published details of the trip. Every man and his dog knew where he was going and why. One theory about his murder that later emerged, suggested that Marchese had plotted the murder from his base in New Orleans. Another, that the Italian police, in the payment of the Mafia, set it up. Yet another, that the two men who approached him in the restaurant, who were apparently informers working for Joe, were in fact working for his killer, and were busy making him the patsy for his own hit.<br /> <br /> In all probability, his arch nemesis, Vito Cascioferro was plotting his death, day by day as Joe moved closer and closer to Palermo. Like a big, fat tarantula spider, the Mafia boss waited near his web, ready to spin in and destroy the man he hated and whose death he had lusted after for over five years. Although examining magistrates interviewed fifteen people, including the Mafia don, no one was every charged with the murder.<br /> <br /> After Petrosino’s murder, the American consul, Bishop, found in Petrosino’s valise, a piece of paper written in the detective’s handwriting: “Cascioferro, resident of Bisaquino, a dreaded criminal.” <br /> <br /> The policeman had carried his killer’s name. The murderer his victim’s photograph.<br /> <br /> Joe Petrosino’s body was returned to New York and buried in St. Patrick's old cathedral where, in 1907, he had married his sweetheart Adelina Saulino. The funeral ceremony witnessed by over 250,000 people became a major event in the New York calendar. The funeral procession took over five hours to travel from the church to the grave where he was laid to rest in Calvary Cemetery, in Brooklyn. His widow received a city pension of $1000 a year to support herself and her daughter. She lived on with her memories, for another 48 years, dying in 1957 at the age of ninety-nine.<br /> <br /> There are still traces in New York of that brave police officer, one hundred years after his brutal murder. In lower Manhattan, on the corner of Lafayette and Kenmare Streets, sits the Lieutenant Giuseppe Petrosino Park and monument. It is small, littered with garbage, and ignored by the public. Ironically, across from the north-west corner, on the junction of Lafayette and Spring Streets sits a building that in the 1930s was a hub of anarchist and mob activity. <br /> <br /> His photo hangs on the wall on the 13th floor of One Police Plaza, commemorating the only officer of the force killed in the line of duty outside of America. <br /> <br /> Joe Petrosino's life and death was the subject of one of the first feature length films (silent) ever produced in the U.S.: 'The Adventures of Lieutenant Petrosino' made in 1912, by the Feature Photoplay Company of New York, produced and directed by Sydney Goldin. <br /> <br /> On the night of Petrosino's murder, Vito Cascioferro dined with a Sicilian parliamentary deputy, the right honourable De Michele Ferrantelli, who supposedly had the best cook in Sicily. Vito loved his food, as his huge belly testified. Some legends have it, he had enjoyed the meal, leaving between courses, to shoot Petrosino, giving him the coup de grace as the seriously wounded detective slumped against the garden fence, and then returning to savour the delights of the cassata, coffee and grappa, and his favourite monogrammed Hungarian cigarettes. The deputy and his guests swore on oath that Cascioferro never left the table that night.<br /> <br /> Privately, Don Vito made no secret of his role in the killing. “My action,” he claimed, “was a disinterested one and in response to a challenge I could not afford to ignore.”<br /> <br /> Every Wednesday following the execution of Petrosino, Cascioferro dined with his friend the politician, on the same meal, that has become a legend in Palermo, and is still created to this day in some of the better restaurants there. It consisted of roasted olives followed by chauchas (green beans) in mint, then salmon garnished with hinojo seeds, which preceded the course of baked lamb in lechtal sauce. It ended with a special Sicilian cassata. <br /> <br /> It is apparently a meal to die for.<br /> <br /> By the time Petrosino lay dead on the rain washed cobblestones of the Piazza Marina, Vito Cascioferro, at the age of 47, was at the top of his profession. If not the capo di tutti capi, he was the nearest thing to the boss of bosses in the Sicilian Mafia. He held power over at least seven major Mafia cosche, or families, in Palermo province: Bisacquino, Campofiorito, Corleone, Contessa Entillina, Chiusa Scalfani, Burgio and Villafranca Sicula, as well as some of the districts of Palermo City, and his presence and word appeared to be honoured by the capos of gangs he didn’t officially control. Prominent figures on both sides of the law owed him favours, and rumour had it that if he felt so inclined, he could arrange the recovery of any property stolen anywhere in Sicily. It was largely because of his presence and forceful personality that the Mafia flourished through the first thirty years of the twentieth century, and in Rome, legislators knew what was expected of them in return for his ability to deliver votes when needed. <br /> <br /> He established his image as an enlightened modern man of the twentieth century by making a pioneer trip in a hot-air balloon. He is accredited with creating the framework of extortion called <span style="font-style:italic;">pizzi</span>, an onomatopoeic word in the Sicilian dialect which translates roughly into English as “rackets.” Pizzi is the beak of a small bird, and in his usual conservative and understated way, Cascioferro spoke of levying a “toll” calling it in Sicilian: <span style="font-style:italic;">fari ragnari a pizzi-</span> “wetting the beak.”<br /> <br /> “Don’t be greedy” he would say, “you have to skim the cream off the milk without breaking the bottle.”<br /> <br /> His descendants are still wetting the beak to this day, across Sicily.<br /> <br /> Meticulous in appearance, he would often appear in public in a frock-coat, wide-brimmed fedora, pleated shirt and flowing cravat. His conduct described as princely, his demeanour modest but majestic, he was a king of sorts. Under his reign, peace and order was observed, albeit, the peace of the Mafia, which was hardly what the official law of the Kingdom of Italy would have imposed, but not many people stopped to draw too fine a distinction. <br /> <br /> In his later years, he sported a long, white beard, and grew his hair long. A favourite of high society in Palermo, he was constantly in demand to host art exhibitions, and organize social parties and musical evenings. He was often reported gambling significant amounts of money at the Circoli dei Civili, a prominent gentleman's club, in Palermo. Sometimes, dressed in Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, he would go on thrush-shooting jaunts, and join the Palermo aristocracy to pelt children of the poor with cakes and candies on All Saints Eve. He was a magnet to women, and once had to chastise his barber for selling off his hair-clippings to be used by a manufacturer of amulets.<br /> <br /> The primary social meeting place in Palermo at this time was the Birreria Italia Café, and Don Vito was often a visitor. Dressed like a Mississippi gambler, he would arrive at eleven in the morning to drink the full, dark roasted coffee, and have his hand kissed by hangers-on. By his side, would be his pearl-encrusted mistress, who legend has it, was not only a woman of nobility, but who had also persuaded him to make her the first female member of the Mafia. Now that's something to try and get to grips with.<br /> <br /> Luigi Barzini, the Italian writer claimed Cascioferro brought the Mafia to its highest perfection without undue recourse to violence.<br /> <br /> In 1921, Cascioferro gave his blessing to one of his youngest and most promising <span style="font-style:italic;">picciotti</span>, or soldiers, to leave Palermo and travel to New York. The word <span style="font-style:italic;">picciotti</span>, literally “the boys” in the Palermitan dialect, had acquired a sinister meaning by the start of the twentieth century. It was the vernacular term for the gunmen of the Mafia. He often said he thought the young man had talent and would go far in the life. He had, and he did. The youth idolized the Don and may well have spent the rest of his life trying to justify his mentor's approval. He stepped off the S.S. Vincenzo Florio, in Newport, Virginia on December 23rd, 1921, and into the pages of mob history.<br /> <br /> His name was Carlo Gambino.<br /> <br /> Sometime between 1924 and 1925, another of his protégées, this time a mature man in his forties, also left Sicily bound for New York. His objective may have been to establish a bridge-head for the eventual and triumphant return of Don Vito back into the New York underworld. Some crime historians claim that there was in fact no link between the two men. If there was, he was unable to achieve this goal, but he had a major, although transient impact on the formation and future of the American Mafia. <br /> <br /> His name was Salvatore Maranzano.<br /> <br /> Early in the 1920’s, things started to change for the worse for the Mafia. Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator became the premier of Italy in 1922. Visiting Sicily in 1924, he was humiliated at the hands of the Mafia. Surrounded by a mob of bodyguards he arrived in the small town of Piani dei Greci, the only town in Sicily, in Italy in fact, to have a Greek Orthodox Church, and was gently rebuked by the Mafia mayor, Don Ciccio Cuccia, described as a “malevolent frog of a man.” <br /> <br /> “There is no need for so many police,” the mayor is reported to have said. “Your Excellency has nothing to fear here when you are with me.” The notion than anyone could control absolute power, anywhere in Italy, except himself, infuriated Mussolini, a man with an ego bigger than Mount Etna, and within a year he had promoted into the prefecture of Palermo police, one of his closest aides, Cesare Mori.<br /> <br /> His mandate was simple. To destroy the Mafia. Mori also hated them with a passion. He announced his intentions when he made his first public address following his appointment:<br /> <br /> "My name is Mori and delinquency must disappear or I shall have people killed. If Sicilians are afraid of the Mafia, I'll show them I'm the meanest Mafioso of them all."<br /> <br /> For four years, instituting a program he called “Plan Attila,” Mori had all legal rights in Sicily suspended, torture was used to obtain confessions and suspected mafioso were often tried and convicted of non existent crimes. Victims of hearsay and innuendo were put in chains and shipped by the boat load to penal island prisons off the coast of Sicily. If anyone came close to destroying the Mafia, it was Mussolini and Mori.<br /> <br /> Of all the eleven thousand men taken into custody and imprisoned, Mori’s greatest catch was Don Vito Cascioferro. Arrested and tried on a trumped-up charge of smuggling, in 1928, through most of his trial, the Mafia boss contented himself with disdainfully ignoring the proceedings of the court. Along with the smuggling charges, the law remanded him in connection with twenty murders, a number of robberies and thirty-seven acts of extortion and fifty-three other offences. Before sentence, on the smuggling charges, he was asked whether he had anything he wanted to say in his defence. Don Vito replied, “Gentlemen, as you have been unable to obtain proof of any of the numerous crimes I have committed, you have been reduced to condemning me for the only one I never committed.”<br /> <br /> Another version of the downfall of Cascioferro suggests he was in fact arrested earlier, in 1926, and condemned by the Court of Assizes of Agrigento to prison for the murder of Francesco Falconieri and Gioacchino Lo Voi.<br /> <br /> Sentenced to life for either of these crimes, and imprisoned in the gaunt and daunting Bourbon Ucciardone prison in Palermo, and died there in 1945. Prisoners took their turns in cleaning out his cell and making his bed. If a guard got too overbearing, Don Vito spoke to the governor, and the jailer was discharged.<br /> <br /> At some point, he had a prisoner carve into one of the prison corridor walls a motto in Sicilian dialect which read, “<span style="font-style:italic;">Vicaria, malalia e nicisitati, si vidu lu cori di l’amicu:</span> “In prison, in sickness and in want, one discovers the heart of a friend.” <br /> <br /> It remained long after he died, covered and protected by a sheet of glass for future generations of prisoners to ponder. It stayed in place until sometimes in the 1960s when the current prison governor had it painted over.<br /> <br /> Don Vito finally died of heart failure at the age of eighty-three. His cell became almost a shrine, and was from then on, always used to hold prisoners of distinction. However, one Mafia researcher, Arrigo Pettaco, claimed in fact he died earlier, in 1943 while imprisoned at Puzzuoli Prison, near Naples. The prison was evacuated during the war, and his guards fleeing an allied air attack, left him behind, to die of thirst.<br /> <br /> Vito Cascioferro laid the foundation for a criminal organization without equal, anywhere in the world in his time. He beget generation after generation of men who would come to carry out and develop his concepts: Calogero Vizzini, who was followed by Giuseppe Genco Russo, who handed over to Dr. Michele Navarra, who was then brutally murdered and his position grabbed by the homicidal maniac, and youngest Mafia boss in history, 19 year old Luciano Liggio. From him the reins were taken over by Michele Greco, and then on to Salavatore “Toto” Riina, who lifted the Mafia’s propensity for violence and destruction to new levels. From there it was all downhill through other monsters like Giovani Brusca and Bernardo Provenzano. Between 1977 and 1992, in a population of five million people, there would be over 10,000 underworld killings and assassinations, as a consequence of a power struggle within the <span style="font-style:italic;">sistema del potere</span>, the system, the power structure, by which organized crime is more often referred to than Mafia or Cosa Nostra on the island of Sicily.<br /> <br /> To-day in Sicily, the Mafia is on the defensive for the first time in generations. However it is believed that there are still around 600 cosches involving perhaps up to 25,000 “made” men and over 250,000 associates. This, on an island with a population around the size of Atlanta, Georgia. In 2006, it was estimated the Mafia generated revenues of around 30 billion Euro ($US 46 billion approx.) <br /> <br /> There is little doubt that the Mafia will continue to operate in one form or another. The <span style="font-style:italic;">sistema del portere</span> is now as much a part of the Sicilian landscape as olive trees. As one boss gets taken down, there is sure to be another who will appear to take over the seat of power. <br /> <br /> Nonetheless, there was only ever one Sun King of the Mafia, and he was Don Vito Cascioferro.</p>
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