The dispute was resolved in Manhattan on September 10, 1931, when Maranzano was murdered by Luciano’s hit men.
To literally add insult to injury, Luciano dispatched four Jewish assassins to dispose of Maranzano. From that day on, the New York Mafia families would require Italian blood for official membership—Luciano always compromised—but would open their doors to anyone who could earn a buck.
To this day, just about every New York Mafia crew has a trusted Jew in its ranks. There were two tough Jews on my own indictment, listed as members of my crew.
I think [mobsters are] the most unracist people in the world. They’re just greedy. The only color they care about is green, the color of money. They don’t give a shit about any nationality, any religion, any anything.
—Sammy “The Bull” Gravano
Mobsters are loose with racial slurs and love ethnic jokes, but they make money with Irish, black, Greek, Russian, and Chinese mobsters. Not because society compels them to do so—they obviously don’t fret too much over society’s mores—but because it’s the smart thing to do.
As for women, the American Mafia will do business with them, but considers them second-class citizens. The Italian Mafia has developed a more liberal attitude toward women.
In Italy, Anna Mazza, nicknamed “The Black Widow,” controlled her own crime family after her husband was murdered in 1976. She cultivated relationships with politicians and guided the family’s economic interests.
Pupetta Maresca, or “Madame Camorra,” personally gunned down her husband’s murderer in broad daylight. After a stint in prison, she returned to the streets with an honorable reputation and took over many rackets normally controlled by men.
Maria Serraino was a female “don” sentenced to life in prison, and Giusy Vitale, referred to as “the godmother,” headed one of Sicily’s most powerful crime families.
The women became clan managers, entrepreneurs, and bodyguards. They were better at business, less obsessed with ostentatious shows of power, and less eager for conflict.
—Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah
Immacolata Capone, who secured building contracts from local politicians, was the driving force behind the Mob’s climb to the top of the construction industry in Naples.
Although she was protected by female bodyguards, most of her soldiers were men. As further proof of the Italian Mafia’s equal treatment of women, hit men gunned her down on the street when, as a boss, she overstepped her boundaries. Now that’s equal rights, coming and going.
In the seventies, Yugoslav dictator Marshal Tito received a visit from future British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. While discussing Madame Mao, who seemed to be interfering with politics in China following her husband’s death, Tito seized an opportunity to take a jab at Thatcher.
“I don’t believe in women interfering in politics,” Tito said.
Thatcher, sharp as a razor, responded, “I don’t interfere with politics. I am politics.”
LESSON 70
A Little Give and Take: Hospitality
SICILIAN Mafia boss Benedetto Spera was on the lam for years. While in hiding, Spera needed the help of countless hoodlums, some of whom took him into their households. Since harboring a fugitive is illegal, all the families who helped Spera risked their freedom.
To avoid capture, Spera’s loyal underlings shuffled him around in the dead of night, carried him up and down mountains, and splashed through mud and donkey shit.
As a guest in his men’s houses, Spera kicked his feet up on the sofa and threw around his weight. As if bossing his men around in front of their families wasn’t enough humiliation, he ran their wives into the ground with incessant requests.
His character and manners made his power hateful.
—Plutarch, The Life of Theseus
Spera’s men were caught on tape complaining about his abuse: “I’ve barely been home. I’m the real fugitive,” “We’ve been his slaves.”
Not surprisingly, Spera was dimed. Whoever made the call must have hung up the phone and danced a jig. Imagine the party Spera’s men had when he was led away in cuffs. The police probably thought they were being shot at while it was just the sound of champagne corks popping.
In contrast to Spera, another Sicilian Mafia boss, Bernardo Provenzano, was on the lam for forty years. Nobody gave him up. Provenzano enjoyed the hospitality of countless households and showed his appreciation any way he could. After his hosts served him dinner, Provenzano washed dishes and swept the floors.
When Provenzano was finally captured, he asked the arresting officer if a snitch had given him up. He must have been relieved to learn that it was sheer investigative work that did him in.
Provenzano’s gratitude toward the many people who fed, clothed, and hid him for four decades was appreciated, and no one had betrayed him.
When you’re the boss, people will fall over themselves to be hospitable toward you. Don’t take it for granted, like Spera did. Appreciate it like Provenzano. And of course, always be hospitable to your own guests.
LESSON 71
Tip the Coat Check: Charity
MY friend “Fat George” DiBello was the caretaker for John Gotti’s social club in Queens. While tending bar on a busy night, George scooped up a few hundred in tips. The majority of mobsters were generous, but one in particular stood out: Joe Watts.
One thing Santo [Trafficante] did was tip. He tipped big-time.
—Frank Ragano
If Joe asked George for a glass of water from the tap, he dropped a crisp hundred on the bar. When George refilled his glass, Joe left another hundred, and before Joe left the club, he’d drop a third. Three hundred bucks for two glasses of rusty tap water.
Joe Watts started out as a close confidant of Don Carlo Gambino. When Carlo died, Joe became a major earner and counselor to Paul Castellano. When Castellano was killed, Joe became the right-hand man of John Gotti. Few knights have survived the court intrigues of three different kings. Joe not only survived, but prospered under each king.
There’s a long list of Darwinian traits responsible for Joe’s survival, but being known as the most generous man in the Mob certainly helped.
I got close with Joe in the can. After I hired and fired several top-notch, jerk-off attorneys, Joe walked over to me and said, “Why not hire my lawyer?”
Joe called his lawyer, who then came to visit me in prison. After our visit, I decided to hire the lawyer and asked him the cost of his retainer.
“I’m already retained,” he said. “Joe took care of it. He sent a guy to my office this morning.”
It’s common practice for a mobster to retain a lawyer to represent a potential witness against him; it’s smart, not generous. But Joe owed me nothing. He and I weren’t coconspirators or codefendants; Joe did this out of pure kindness and generosity.
When a mobster died, Santo [Trafficante] would fly to that city, always with an envelope of money in hand for the widow.
—Frank Ragano
Even in the Mob, charity is recognized as a virtue, and the Mob comes down hard on mobsters who use charities to defraud people.
In 1976, First Lady Rosalynn Carter attended a fund-raising event with cult leader Jim Jones. Jones later moved to Guyana and orchestrated the slaughter of nine hundred men, women, and children.
Gambino soldier Jimmy Eppolito must have heard about the First Lady’s naïveté. He decided to take her for a ride, recruiting the first lady to promote his charity, the International Children’s Appeal.
Eppolito was skimming millions of dollars from the charity. I guess he felt he deserved the money more than poor, destitute children with swollen bellies and flies landing on their eyelids. He also used the fund to launder money from his drug operations. Nice guy.
Mrs. Carter was fooled and invited Eppolito to Washington so she could take some photos with him. Mrs. Carter with a Mafia hit man. Mrs. Carter with a savage cult leader. If we’re still curious as to the identity of Jack the Ripper, it’s
worth flipping through the pages of Mrs. Carter’s old photo albums.
Anyway, the media had a field day with her Mafia photos. Comedians, late-night talk show hosts, everyone got in on the joke.
But the Mafia wasn’t laughing. A contract immediately went out on Eppolito and he was whacked. The Mafia was disgraced by his fraudulence because they take great pride in acting straight up when it comes to charities.
In 2004, Queens borough president Helen Marshall honored reputed Genovese mobster Anthony “Tough Tony” Federici for his service to the community. In 2007, New York state senator Serphin Maltese honored reputed Bonanno soldier Vito Grimaldi for his community service.
[Capone] says we all got to tighten our belts a little to help those poor guys who haven’t got any jobs.
—Capone henchman
The giving goes all the way back to the early days of the Mob. Frank Costello chaired many fund-raisers, including the men’s division of the Salvation Army. Black gangster Bumpy Johnson gave out turkeys for Thanksgiving in his poor Harlem neighborhood. Louisiana boss Carlos Marcello once gave ten grand to the Girl Scouts of America. That’s a lot of cookies. He asked them to keep it quiet. They didn’t—they squealed. Remember that sign above Marcello’s door, “THREE CAN KEEP A SECRET IF TWO ARE DEAD”? I’m fairly sure he knew that news of his donation would leak, but I guess he figured it would be good for his image.
Mobsters, like businessmen, know that it’s smart to give, especially when a little press comes with it. It’s cheap advertising. But mobsters also give when nobody is looking.
I never met a mobster, myself included, who didn’t hand a twenty to a panhandler or windshield washer, those guys who used to run up to your car and descend upon your windshield with a squeegee in Manhattan. Maybe the tip made us feel better for all the bad we’d done, or maybe we hoped it offered us protection from evil, like garlic.
Instead of just begging for change, the windshield washers were offering a service. Unlike me and my friends, they were willing to work and not steal. Sadly, most New Yorkers didn’t agree with this rationale and were annoyed by their presence. In the 1990s, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, responding to public outcry, passed a law to sweep squeegee men off the streets. With no skills, opportunities, or assistance, many windshield washers turned to petty crime, robbing the public who wouldn’t allow them to offer a service in return for a coin.
In seventeenth-century England, begging was considered a public nuisance, and beggars were removed from the streets. What followed in that same century were the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London, which wiped out 80 percent of the city.
New York was hit hard by 9/11. I’m not saying that God punished us for the squeegee men; to think so would be insane. But when tragedy strikes, it’s nice to have a clear conscience.
While John Gotti, Jr., may have committed all the crimes the government has accused him of, there was a charitable side to him as well. In 1912, the U.S. Postmaster General instituted a “Letters to Santa” program, in which needy children write letters to Santa, addressed to the North Pole. The children usually praise their own good behavior and ask Santa to reward them with a Christmas gift. Ordinarily, businesspeople “adopt” a letter and fulfill a child’s wish.
John Gotti, Jr., would acquire a stack of letters addressed to the North Pole, then hand them to Fat George along with a few grand in cash. Fat George would drive to Toys “R” Us, fulfill the children’s specific wishes, load the presents into his van, and deliver them.
Many a poor family in Chicago thinks I’m Santa Claus.
—Al Capone
When I heard the news that Junior had been acquitted in court for the fourth time, I recalled his dedication to needy children and wondered if his anonymous generosity had protected him in his own time of need.
Have compassion for the have-nots. Giving comes back around tenfold, and protects us from evil, like garlic.
LESSON 72
Eat, Drink, and Be Productive: The Only Bribe I’ll Advise You to Make
THIS guy, Tony, lost his job and started a card game in Ozone Park. It was Mob territory, so Tony asked a local wiseguy for a license to operate. He was open about a month when I bumped into him and asked how his game was going.
“Makin’ money?”
“Shit,” he said, disgusted. “I’m gonna close down if it don’t pick up.”
“I ain’t lookin’ to shake you down,” I assured him. “You’re already wit’ somebody.”
“No, I ain’t lyin’. Maybe it’s the spot.”
Tony’s game was located in the back room of a storage warehouse and the players had to walk around pallets of merchandise to get there, but gamblers will trek into the Amazon rain forest and wrestle anacondas to play cards.
“It’s not the spot,” I said. “You serve food?”
“Peanuts. I put out a few bowls.”
“What are they, elephants? Put out Sternos wit’ ziti an’ manicotti. What can it cost you, a hundred bucks a night? An’ serve liquor to keep them loose. A few drinks an’ they’re happy to lose their pants.”
“You think my problem is food?”
“Sure, everybody loves to eat.”
A free meal is never free, but nobody knows that. As a mobster, I’d blow ten grand in Atlantic City and brag that they gave me a prime rib dinner on comp. Big fucking deal. A measly steak. I could have purchased a herd of bulls for ten grand.
Tony took my advice and started to serve food at his card game. Word spread and his joint filled up. I bumped into him a few months later.
After business, Carlos [Marcello] would provide his faithful with food and drink.
—John H. Davis, Mafia Kingfish
“I’m doin’ great,” he told me. “The food thing worked. A few moochers show up to eat, but even they play long enough to cover their meals.”
“Cops or firemen?”
“Both. How’d you know?”
“They think they got somethin’ comin’,” I replied. “They’re worse than us.”
My cousin Don is a partner in an auto body shop that has fifty employees. Every Friday afternoon, he orders twenty pizza pies with toppings. His workers dance the salsa, a slice in one hand, a wrench in the other.
A lot of companies feed their employees to keep them at their desks and get them back to work faster. It’s a sensible management practice, and one that dates back to at least the Renaissance.
During the Renaissance, Brunelleschi was an Italian architect who also did a little jail time. When Brunelleschi was building his famous dome in Florence, he fed his workers “aloft in order to foil idlers.” He also did not want them to waste time walking up and down three hundred steps and return to work exhausted.
Lunch meetings, dinner dates, birthdays, and banquets; everything we do revolves around food. Look at all the chef shows. Ever think how much of this world is shaped in a restaurant? Next time you’re there, look around at the tables. A man is proposing, friendships are beginning, families are laughing, businessmen are conniving, mobsters are whispering. Everyone’s bullshitting with a forkful of food in their mouths.
[Tony] Bananas always hosted a major Mob dinner on Thursdays. Guys would come from Philly, Atlantic City, and New York for an evening of good Italian food and drink, and sometimes we fed forty or fifty guys.
—George Fresolone and Robert J. Wagman, Blood Oath
Although the source varies, the story comes down to us that Queen Marie Antoinette was told that the people of France were starving.
“They’re poor, and can’t afford bread,” said a concerned member of her court.
“Let them eat cake,” she responded.
We may laugh at her naïveté, but she was right. The problem was that she never really baked the friggin’ cakes and handed them out to her subjects. Had she, it might’ve saved her ass—or head.
The United States represents 5 percent of the world’s population and locks up 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. How do we keep so m
any prisoners from rioting? In part, we give them cake. I’m not kidding. In prison, I’ve seen thousands of men receive sentences in which the punishment far outweighed the crime. They complained but never talked of revolt.
Then one evening, chow was served without dessert; the kitchen ran out of sweets. In less than a minute, trays were flying and tables were overturned.
The unit manager, a civilian administrator who ranks above the prison guards, called me into his office, knowing I had a good rapport with my fellow prisoners. He asked me if I could calm them until he was able to send out for ice cream pops.
An hour later, I was amazed to see a chow hall full of hardened cons as happy as babies sucking on pacifiers.
Sigmund Freud saw human behavior as driven by what he called “life instincts.” Our strongest instinct, he said, is to seek food. Help people find it and you’re the boss.
At least once a week, every classy mobster puts out a big spread at his social club. He’s buying loyalty with food. Often, the way to people’s hearts is through their stomachs.
LESSON 73
I’m Comin’ on the Heist Tonight: The Hands-on Boss
IN the early nineties, the second civil war in thirty years broke out in New York’s Colombo family. The Persico faction was warring with the Orena faction over who would be the family’s undisputed boss.
Carmine “The Snake” Persico was leader of the Persico faction. He had previously established himself on the Brooklyn battlefield and had the scars to prove it. Persico was shot in the face, qualifying him for a Purple Heart—except the Mafia doesn’t award medals.
Victor “Little Vic” Orena was the leader of the rebel faction; mostly Young Turks and a few old-timers.
Persico had always been a hands-on boss, but he was incarcerated during the second war, sort of like being a POW. His men fought on without him.
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