The biggest loser was Jack Molinas, once a national college-hoops star at Columbia University. As a sophomore he led the Lions to a 22-0 regular season mark and a berth in the 1951 NCAA tournament. The Ivy League center with a deft scoring touch became a first round NBA draft pick—the fourth player taken overall by the Fort Wayne Pistons in 1953.
His career ended just months later when the six-six forward was suspended indefinitely after admitting to making bets on the Pistons. His defense: “I only made wagers on my team—and always that we’d win. I did not know there was anything wrong with that.”
NBA officials disagreed. Molinas was never reinstated, his once-promising career cut short.
There were rumors and reports that the ex-hoopster developed a relationship with Tommy Eboli and the Chin, but neither was implicated in the scandal that ran from 1957–1961.
The investigation took down twenty-seven college programs—powerhouses St. John’s, Seton Hall, NYU and Connecticut among them. The thirty-seven fixers on the teams were cited for tanking a staggering sixty-seven games. Trial testimony indicated Ralph Gigante was also involved with games played by Columbia and two Philly schools, St. Joseph’s and LaSalle.
But Molinas was charged and convicted as the ringleader, with a sentence of ten to fifteen years behind bars. He did five, mostly in the draconian Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. His postprison career included dealing in pornography and furs imported from Taiwan.
His tale was later cited as the inspiration for The Longest Yard, the box office smash where a point-shaving quarterback ends up behind bars. Star Burt Reynolds walked away a hero at the end of the Hollywood version. Molinas didn’t share the happy ending.
The aging hoops star was standing in the backyard of his Hollywood Hills home when a bullet tore into the back of his head. No one was ever arrested, despite police suspicions of a gangland hit—perhaps in an insurance fraud.
Ralphie Gigante’s second bust came with a comic, rather than tragic, twist.
A gambling investigation by city cops focused on action at Googie’s, a saloon at (where else?) 237 Sullivan Street. A pretty undercover officer named Ann King came by the bar, ostensibly looking for her degenerate gambler husband.
Ralphie provided a shoulder to cry on, along with the odds at local racetracks. After he took a few bets from King, the female officer returned the favor by putting Ralph in handcuffs.
“I can’t believe it,” he moaned after his arrest. “You’re too sweet to be a copper.”
Within eighteen months of the Chin’s release, his brother Pasquale—identified by the FBI as “probably a suspected member of the Genovese family”—was also spied hanging out with his sibling at the mobbed-up Vicarl Social Club on Sullivan Street. The space was the forerunner to the infamous Triangle Civic Improvement Association, the social club on the same block and the Chin’s future base.
With Genovese locked up, the acting boss of the family was the Chin’s longtime associate Tommy Eboli, the erstwhile fight manager and getaway driver installed immediately after Vito went to jail. Shortly before assuming the mantle, Eboli filed a tax return stating that his gross earnings for 1959 were $18,742.
He was about to get a big raise.
* * *
One of Tommy Eboli’s first duties as the stand-in don was the murder of Anthony “Tony Bender” Strollo, done on direct orders from the imprisoned Genovese, according to FBI documents. The once-trusted capo and co-conspirator in the Costello hit had left his home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, on April 8, 1962. He was never seen again, and his body never recovered.
A July 1963 FBI memo stated: Strollo was allegedly killed . . . for disobedience of orders, namely his failure to cease narcotics operation.
The guy with the Irish alias was no stranger to homicide. While Tommy Ryan was running a crap game on the East Side with a fellow mobster in 1956, a pair of dim-bulb stickup men held up the players and made off with the cash.
James Rocoreto and Michael Langone were next seen in the trunk of a parked car on the Lower East Side, their bodies repeatedly hacked with an axe.
Eboli assembled his Mob cabinet: underboss Jerry Catena, who was a moneymaking Genovese veteran, consigliere Mike Miranda and top capos Phil “Benny Squint” Lombardo, a future boss, along with brother Patsy Eboli.
It was this regime that instituted the oft-discussed and oft-disputed Mafia ban on drug dealing, most likely as fallout from the convictions of Genovese and Gigante—along with the increasingly stiff sentences for drug dealing.
A 1963 FBI memo declared: Thomas Eboli had recently instructed all of his associates that absolutely no one in his organization would be permitted to handle or participate in any dealings involving narcotics. Informant learned that any violation of Eboli’s instruction would result in “a visit with Tony Bender.” (That was the Genovese equivalent of “sleeping with the fishes.”)
Another FBI memo said the Mob was getting out of the drug business for another reason. The dope trade was giving them a bad reputation, and they wanted to avoid “the unfavorable publicity” that would result from a “narcotics conviction.”
Vincent Gigante went a step further: he brought a personal “Just Say No” policy to the streets of the Village during the 1960s.
“I’ll give you a story, one little story,” said his brother Louis. “That was an era of drugs, kids getting into drugs, okay? Vincent has a self-importance. This is our neighborhood. One of the kids—a great athlete, I taught him to play basketball—wandered into drugs. Vincent would not allow him to come home and live with his mother on the block. The kid could not come on the block, ’cause he was infected by drugs. And that’s a true story.”
* * *
If the Genovese family was getting away from the drug trade, there was still always sex (prostitution) and rock and roll. Oddly enough, the Mafia clan—made men whose tastes generally ran to Frank Sinatra and Jerry Vale—was in the music business courtesy of an old pal of the Chin: Morris Levy.
Levy was a tough guy from a tough neighborhood and an even tougher childhood. His father and his older brother died of pneumonia when he was just four months old, leaving the infant alone with his widowed mother in a Bronx tenement. Like his friend Vincent Gigante, Levy’s formal education ended early: a thirteen-year-old Morris left school for good after assaulting his seventy-five-year-old homeroom teacher.
“I could get an A in any class,” he once boasted. “But I had this one teacher, she had no business teaching school. Miss Clare . . . never got fucked in her life, probably. And she hated me.”
Levy lashed out after a classroom argument over a math test.
“And I got up—I was a big kid—took her wig off her head, poured an inkwell on her bald head and put her wig back on her fucking head. Walked out of school and said, ‘Fuck school.’”
The rough-and-tumble teen first met Eboli a year later. The unlikely pair became fast and lasting friends.
“I hit Broadway when I was twelve,” Levy once said. “I started working in the checkrooms at the nightclubs. [The Mob] owned all the clubs and had all the liquor licenses.”
He scuffled for a while, working as a dishwasher, a cook and a coat checker. He spent a year in the navy at the tail end of World War II, launched a failed business in Atlantic City and returned to the city of his birth. Gigante and Levy first met as bouncers at a Village nightclub, one of many operated by the Mob in those days. The Chin never strayed far from the neighborhood. Levy moved north on Broadway, where he launched Roulette Records and the legendary jazz club Birdland (previously owned by a mobster with the decidedly nonmusical name of Joe “the Wop” Cataldo).
It was in the latter nightspot where a Mob loan shark collector stabbed Levy’s brother Irving, who made the fatal mistake of ordering the gangster’s wife—a known prostitute—to leave the establishment. Instead, it was Irving who departed. Permanently.
Roulette, which opened in 1956, was an independent label based on the eighteenth floor at 1790 Broadw
ay, with rumors that Eboli provided the seed money. A sign hung on the wall of Levy’s office: O LORD, GIVE ME A BASTARD WITH TALENT. His lament was answered, as some of his label’s early signees included Count Basie, Frankie Lymon and the Chantels.
Levy was among the first in the industry to realize the value of owning a song’s copyright. Among his biggest earners: “Lullaby of Birdland,” which he commissioned, and “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” which he bought up. He routinely took cowriting credits on the work of legitimate songwriters, collecting a piece—or maybe all—of their royalties.
His son Adam, then a kindergarten student, also received cowriting credits on some songs. Nobody complained.
Levy was a multimillionaire businessman with the mouth and attitude of a straight-up gangster. The mogul, a street-smart philosopher prone to profanity, did not believe in redemption: “If a guy’s a cocksucker in his life, when he dies he don’t become a saint.” His raspy voice reeked of intimidation, a complement to his imposing physical presence.
While known throughout the music business, Levy lacked the name recognition (and varnished public relations) of future generations of industry executives: David Geffen, Berry Gordy, Herb Alpert. And that was fine with Levy, who didn’t really give a shit and never denied his Mob connections.
“I know Cardinal Spellman, too,” the hard case once declared. “That don’t make me a Catholic.”
Backed by the Genovese muscle, Levy was known for playing nothing but hardball when it came to making money. He feared no one: Levy once went toe-to-toe with Beatle John Lennon and never blinked. His menacing reputation extended across the Atlantic, where a young Graham Nash was singing in the Hollies.
When the chart-topping British band first came to New York, Levy wooed them with dinner at his club the Roundtable (complete with a visit from a curvaceous belly dancer) and some free time in a Manhattan recording studio.
I suspected it wasn’t out of the goodness of his heart (a muscle insiders claimed had been left out of Morris’ body), and that something else was going on, Nash wrote in his autobiography. But having dinner with Morris Levy was one thing; getting into bed with him was another altogether. We heard stories . . . how he put his name as a writer on all the records that Roulette released . . . and held the mortgage on Alan Freed’s house, how . . . Nah, better not go there.
The elusive Levy had skated from the 1960 payola scandal, which destroyed Freed, the renowned Cleveland DJ and a close pal.
It was unclear when the Genovese family became Levy’s silent partners, but it preceded Gigante’s release on the drug charges. Since before 1963, Morris Levy has been a lucrative source of cash and property for leaders of the Genovese LCN family, one FBI report declared.
Levy eventually put Eboli on the payroll for $1,000 a week after the two launched Promo Records in 1969. And he also struck up a friendship with the Chin’s brother, Father G., who remains a fan to this day. “Morris Levy . . . genius,” he declared. “He never knew one note from another note, but he knew how to make money.”
The upper echelon of the Genovese family certainly agreed. And so did the chart-topping leader of the Shondells, legendary rocker Tommy James.
“I honestly never would have had my success without Morris Levy,” said James. “I would have been lucky to be a one-hit wonder with a fluky song called ‘Hanky Panky.’”
By the time the voice behind “Mony Mony” and “I Think We’re Alone Now” was done with Levy, the cost of doing business with the mobbed-up record exec reached into the high eight figures— and James had a genuine fear of becoming number one with a bullet.
Or a revolver filled with them.
The 1960s
“What did I know about the Mob?” Tommy James asked from his home in the Jersey suburbs. “From watching the TV show The Untouchables, that’s it.”
Once he signed a recording contract with Levy, that changed quickly. By the time James extricated himself from the tentacles of Roulette Records and the Genovese family, he was out somewhere close to $40 million in stolen royalties.
The naïve Niles, Michigan, native, with a song called “Hanky Panky,” was still named Tommy Jackson when he arrived in Manhattan for the first time in mid-1966. His name had already changed before young Mr. Jackson walked through Levy’s imposing mahogany door—he was now Tommy James.
He was just nineteen, and the owner of what everyone agreed was a no-doubt-about-it hit single already filling dance floors in Pittsburgh. The newly christened James was shopping his record to the big labels in the big city, hoping to break out nationally. In one heady day he sat with executives falling over each other to bid on their shot at making him a star.
“Columbia said yes,” he recalled. “Epic, yes. RCA, yes. Atlantic and even Kama Sutra—yes. The last place we talked to was Roulette, and Morris Levy wasn’t even there. I didn’t go along. I was beat after a long day. They just dropped the record off. So I went to bed feeling great. We were going to sign with CBS or one of the corporate labels.”
Around nine-thirty the next morning, the phone began ringing in his hotel room. And ringing. And ringing.
“One by one, all the record companies that said yes the day before called and said, ‘Tom, we gotta pass,’” he recounted. “I’m wondering what’s going on, and finally Jerry Wexler at Atlantic leveled with me. Morris had called all the other labels.”
The man known as “the Godfather” of the music business delivered the same message to each one: “This is my fucking record. Back off.”
They did. Tommy James and the Shondells were officially signed to Roulette. “First offer I couldn’t refuse, I guess,” he said with a wry chuckle.
Within weeks “Hanky Panky” was sitting at number one on the music charts—ahead of the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer.”
Levy was open about his affiliation with Eboli, Gigante and the rest of the Genovese family. And he was just as open about the financial arrangements that would be shared by Morris and the Mob.
“They made it very clear up front. You go for your royalties . . . it wasn’t gonna happen,” James recalled. “I couldn’t get paid. It was like taking a bone from a Doberman.”
An armed Doberman, with a very bad disposition and some equally ill-tempered and well-armed friends.
James later heard the story of Jimmie Rodgers, a hit-making Roulette artist from the 1950s, who broke out with the smash single “Honeycomb.” Five more gold records followed, without any money coming the performer’s way.
Rodgers walked away with two years left on his contract, opting to stop recording rather than make money for Morris Levy. And then one night he was driving through the San Fernando Valley to his California home when a car appeared behind him, flashing the high beams. When Rodgers pulled over, he was yanked from the car and beaten within an inch of his life. Rodgers suffered a fractured skull, broken arm and all the skin on his legs peeled off as the attacker dragged him across the asphalt. The battered singer was left lying in the road.
James’s second visit to the Roulette offices coincided with the arrival of two goons, who pulled Levy aside to recount their baseball bat attack on a New Jersey entrepreneur who ran afoul of Morris. Levy, himself, was an imposing figure who stood a scary six-three and weighed 230 pounds.
One of the two thugs was Nate McCalla, an even more imposing figure who stood an even scarier six-four and weighed a hulking 240 pounds. Nate’s pals included John “Sonny” Franzese, a Colombo family associate of great repute who would one day become the oldest prisoner in the federal penal system. McCalla, a decorated Korean War hero, ran his own record label for Levy while handling all kinds of other business for the boss.
Around Roulette, McCalla’s hands were valued as highly as his ears.
Eboli was a fairly constant presence around the offices, as were the Chin, Fat Tony Salerno and the truly terrifying enforcer Gaetano “Corky” Vastola, a Levy friend and confidant for three decades. James recalled the first time he was introduced to Gi
gante, who was dressed casually in black slacks and a white shirt with the collar open.
There was little friendly about their hello. Even the bombastic Levy was chastened by the presence of the Chin, a big man with a well-kept mane of black hair.
“Morris had a hold of me, he walked me over,” James recounted. “He said, ‘Tommy, this is Mr. Gigante.’ He didn’t call anybody ‘mister’—nobody. Morris was a big guy, right out of central casting. And when Morris says, ‘This is Mr. Gigante,’ [Chin] looks right at me.”
“Hi. How ya doing?” offered the taciturn Gigante, a fan of Elvis Presley from the 1950s. Four words were enough to send a clear message to the long-haired rocker.
“I shook his hand, and I knew it was serious business,” James recalled decades later. “Listen, I didn’t feel that he was menacing as much as serious. The funny part is these guys used Roulette almost as a social club. They’d hang out in Morris’s office, come in, listen to the music.
“But, of course, Roulette was used for everything from laundering money to God knows what. We couldn’t talk about any of this. My whole life became walking on eggshells. If I hadn’t been so young and stupid, I would have been more afraid.”
James remembered how he’d flip on the television to see people he’d met just days earlier at Roulette coming out of a New Jersey warehouse in handcuffs. The Internal Revenue Service was constantly poking through the office, trying to find something—anything—on Levy.
“That,” he said, “is the kind of shit that kept happening.”
Levy’s secretary, who spent a lot of time steering mobsters to her boss’s office, finally explained the whole thing to the stunned young rocker.
James and the Shondells accompanied Democratic presidential hopeful Hubert Humphrey on campaign stops around the country in 1968. The band became a huge live attraction, playing dates alongside the likes of the Beach Boys, the Animals and the Monkees.
James came home for the Roulette Christmas party, hosted by Levy at one of his clubs, the Roundtable, where the music business partied with their Mob partners.
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