6. US Congress, Hearings Before the Select Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, Washington, DC, 1951.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. US Congress, Senate Resolution 202, 81st Congress, 1950.
12. US Congress, Hearings Before the Select Committee . . . Commerce, 1951.
13. Ibid.
14. US Congress, Brief on Federal Intervention in Organized Gambling, 1951.
15. The Elbow Room was located at 793 Palisade Avenue and now houses an Italian restaurant, Villa Amalfi.
16. One version has Moretti being driven up in the Packard by a chauffeur, possibly Genovese mobster Peter LaPlaca.
17. Thom L. Jones, “Whack Out on Willie Moretti.” Gangsters Inc (website), November 18, 2008. http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/whack-out-on-willie-moretti.
18. “A Gangster Is Buried in the Old-Time Style, October 22, 1951, 36–37, archived at https://books.google.com/books?id=rFQEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA36&lpg=PA36 - v=onepage&q&f=false.
19. Federal Bureau of Investigation, La Cosa Nostra, 1963.
20. Volz and Bridge, The Mafia Talks, 29.
21. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, United States of America, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics: Hearing Before the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Index, September 25, 27, October 1, 2, 8, and 9, 1963; October 10, 11, 15, and 16, 1963; October 29, 1963, July 28, 29, and 30, 1964 ([Washington, DC]: US Congress, 1964), archived at https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/119303NCJRS.pdf.
22. The unnamed informant was likely California mobster Frank Bompensiero.
23. St. Petersburg (FL) Times, “New Jersey Police Chief, Awaiting Trial, Ends Life,” October 7, 1951, archived at https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=yR0LAAAAIBAJ&sjid=GE8DAAAAIBAJ&pg=2035,2095540&dq=fort+lee+police.
24. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics.
Chapter 6
The DeCavalcantes
The hamlet of Apalachin is a small census-designated community in the town of Owego, part of Tioga County, New York. The small community is located on the Susquehanna River and boasts a population of just over one thousand, similar to what the population would have been in November 1957. The small, quiet town was home to Joseph Barbara Sr., a Sicilian immigrant and president of the Endicott Canada Dry Bottling Company of Endicott, New York, a perfect position for a man whose past included bootlegging during Prohibition. Twice arrested on suspicion of murder, Barbara lived away from prying eyes, on a fifty-eight-acre estate in an eleven-room stone house, with caretaker’s cottage and a two-story horse barn. It was at this out-of-the-way locale that mobsters convened on November 14, 1957, for what they thought was to be a meeting of the minds, with all the major mob figures from across the country getting together to talk business. And, what with the spectacular gangland slaying of New York boss Albert Anastasia, the burgeoning casino business in Cuba, and the recent attempted assassination of the “Prime Minister of the Underworld,” Frank Costello, there was no shortage of subjects to discuss.
The thinking that the Barbara house would be an ideal spot was based on its out-of-the-way location—up a hill on a dead-end street—and Barbara’s good relationship with the locals. But when dozens of well-dressed men, many driving from out of state, started showing up in town, checking into local motels, it was apparent that something big was going on, and it caught the attention of a pair of New York State Troopers, Edgar D. Croswell and Vincent Vasisko. The two were checking on a complaint unrelated to the conference at the Parkway Motel when they observed Joe Barbara reserving rooms for out-of-town guests. The troopers knew Barbara’s checkered history and decided to do a little digging. They staked out the motel and jotted down the license-plate numbers of guests arriving at the motel. The next day the two police officers made a trip up to the Barbara estate. When they pulled up the drive, they noticed a dozen men exiting the back of the house. The mobsters, seeing the troopers, panicked and started to leave all at once. Vasisko later recalled, “It was a misty day. We were in plainclothes, but one of the guys looked up at the road and hollered, ‘It’s the staties, it’s the staties,’ and they all started running into the fields and the woods. We had no reason to arrest anybody; they weren’t doing anything wrong.”[1]
The troopers called in for backup and set up roadbocks around the area. They also combed through the nearby woods, picking up some of the fleeing attendees. It must have been a sight to find men in camel-hair coats, spats, and dress shoes, trudging through the trees, woefully out of their element, uncertain where they were going. The troopers also canvassed Barbara’s home and garage, finding a number of cars belonging to the attendees.
Fifty-eight men were detained, questioned, and ultimately released.[2] While follow-up subpoenas and obstruction-of-justice charges resulted in little more than nuisances for the rounded-up men, the revelation that Mafia figures from around the country were meeting to discuss underworld business at a remote home in upstate New York cemented the concept that there was a nationwide organized-crime syndicate in operation. Though the concept of a nationwide crime syndicate had been reported for decades and investigated by the Bureau of Narcotics, it was not much countenanced by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. Now, however, with the ensuing publicity and outright evidence that the attendees were tied together in a multitude of illegal business ventures, the FBI started to shift priorities and resources toward fighting the mob, adopting the Top Hoodlum Program and focusing efforts on gathering as much data and information as they could on the mob.
The reasons for the meeting at Barbara’s Apalachin retreat were not made clear to police or investigators. “None of [the meeting invitees] suggested that they had been invited to a gathering for other than social purposes, and only three said that they had been invited at all. The most common explanation, given in one form or another by ten, was that the purpose of the visit was to call upon Barbara, a sick friend. Eleven gave other explanations for their visit to Barbara’s.”[3] In the ensuing years, theories about the real purpose of the meeting have focused on a few key areas. The first was the ascension of Vito Genovese to the head of the Luciano/Costello crime family; since his job promotion was hurried along by an attempted hit on a respected boss and influential Mafia member, a meeting to smooth things over was in order. There was also the Anastasia hit and its implications for the Mangano crime family; the new family boss, Carlo Gambino, had attended Apalachin. Other theories batted about included the importance of Cuba and all the ancillary action the mob was running on the island. Finally, drugs and narcotics trafficking was a major issue at that time in the mob’s history; increased involvement by American and Sicilian mobsters in the “French Connection” heroin-smuggling operation was paralleled with increased scrutiny from the Bureau of Narcotics, along with stiffer penalties for convicted drug activity.
These thorny issues were likely, then, to be addressed at Apalachin by a mix of crime families, of various rankings, with bosses and underbosses, capos and consiglieres, from as far away as Dallas, Los Angeles, and Tampa. Of the mobsters netted in the New York State Police roundup were eight from New Jersey—next to New York, the most-represented state among the attendees.
One of the cars that was stopped was a 1957 Chrysler Imperial sedan, driven by Russell Bufalino, mob boss of the northeast Pennsylvania Mafia, Joe Barbara’s crime family. Bufalino’s car was crammed full of most of the New Jersey contingent. Though the Imperial sedan was over eighteen feet long, it must have been a cramped ride for the elite of the New Jersey underworld.
Jerry Catena was in Bufalino’s car, along with Vito Genovese. Catena, at the time, was living in South Orange, a leafy suburb of Newark, while Genovese was living in Atlantic Highlands. Charles Salvatore Chiri, fellow crime family member, who lived in Palisades Park, New Jersey, had a
lso wedged himself into the automobile. Two New Jersey–based representatives of the Philadelphia mob were also passengers in Bufalino’s car: Dominick Oliveto was a Camden resident who had taken over the Camden-area rackets after the death of Philly mob underboss Marco Reginelli just the year prior; Oliveto’s rap sheet included a series of arrests for gambling and bootlegging, and he was involved in a number of businesses in South Jersey. Joseph Ida, boss of the Philadelphia Mafia, lived in Highland Park.
The Bonanno crime family’s New Jersey operations were represented by Anthony Riela of West Orange, another Newark suburb; Riela owned the Airport Motel outside what was then known as Newark Metropolitan Airport. Believed to have been a member of the Newark family under Gaspare D’Amico before it had broken up, Riela was also close with Illinois-based mobsters from Chicago and Rockford and remained active in the Bonanno crime family into the mid-1980s.
Two of the fleeing Apalachin attendees had stopped a local student driving home from school and asked him for a ride; the student later recounted, “It was an unusual day. My actual encounter with them was brief. They got in my car, and I took them down the road. Then they flagged down another car, a friend of mine.”[4] After the two men got into the second car, they were stopped at one of the roadblocks the state troopers had set up. These two men—Lou Larasso and Frank Majuri—were officers in Local 394 of the International Hod Carriers’ Building and Common Laborers’ Union in Elizabeth, New Jersey.[5] Though not as well-known as some of the other attendees, Larasso and Majuri were two well-regarded members of the small Elizabeth crime family that had, for the most part, flown under the radar of law enforcement up until that day in Apalachin. In fact, while individual Elizabeth family members had arrest records and were cross-listed in various documents as criminal associates, there was little indication law enforcement considered the men part of a crime family. In reading through FBI reports of the late 1950s and ’60s, it’s apparent that the FBI was, for the most part, unaware of this sixth family, though there were many who considered the Elizabeth family to be one of the oldest crime families in the United States.
The boss of the Elizabeth family at that time of the Apalachin fiasco was likely the longtime Zwillman associate who had been involved in the 1930 Rising Sun Brewery shooting, Nick Delmore. Although informants still named Phil Amari as Elizabeth boss until he retired to Italy in 1958, it is probable that Delmore was either actual boss or acting boss in 1957. His close circle included Emanuel Riggi and the two Apalachin attendees Majuri and Larasso, as well as Sal Caternicchio and Joseph Sferra. Delmore himself had led an interesting double life: he’d risen to become boss of a Mafia family while cultivating the image of businessman, farmer, and community benefactor.
During Prohibition, Delmore had owned a number of speakeasies and hotels, including one in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, that had been robbed by two low-level gangsters back in 1926. But to residents of Berkeley Heights and nearby Plainfield, where he lived at the time, Delmore was a successful businessman and millionaire. Vacations he and his family took to their summer homes in Belmar and Long Branch on the Jersey Shore were featured in the society pages, and when his son needed an appendectomy, it appeared as an item of note in the local paper. There was even a curious mention in the paper on May 14, 1928: “Approximately 100 Plainfield Italians attended the annual outing of the Nick Delmore Association which was held yesterday at Kuntz’s Grove on the Passaic River.”[6] Delmore even donated a parcel of land in Berkeley Heights to the town so a volunteer fire station could be built, giving them $1,500 to start construction.
Not everyone thought so highly of Delmore, however. While many considered him “a fine, generous, and thrifty citizen . . . equal number describe him as a hoodlum, a racketeer, a braggart and the proprietor of questionable resorts.”[7] This perception only increased after the Rising Sun Brewery incident. And while Delmore was ultimately acquitted of the slaying, his three years on the lam and negative exposure during the trial wore away at the veneer of an honest businessman. He was sought for questioning by the FBI in 1939, along with his old Prohibition compatriot Doc Stacher. By the early 1940s Delmore had relocated to Elizabeth, where he was involved with illegal gambling. He spent time in Florida in 1947, operating a craps game in Miami, and then relocated back to New Jersey, settling in the town of Long Branch on the Shore.
In 1952 Delmore took a trip to the mobbed-up capital of vice in the Caribbean—Havana, Cuba—to visit with exiled mob boss Lucky Luciano. But upon his return to the United States, Delmore was detained by Immigration and charged with entering the country without a valid passport. The government contended that Delmore was not an American citizen and that this was the second time in five years the mobster had left the country and reentered without proper documentation, the first instance being in 1947 when Delmore had gone to Puerto Rico.
According to most sources, Delmore was born Nicola Amoruso in Nicosia, Italy, on December 23, 1891. But Delmore was equally adamant that he had been born the United States. In 1953 a reporter visited Delmore at his dairy farm, Delwake Farms, in Freehold, New Jersey, where the mob boss was photographed atop a tractor assisting a work crew cleaning out an irrigation ditch on his property. Delmore asserted to the reporter that he had been born in San Francisco in 1888 and that his birth record had been destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. He said his father had come to the States to work on the Union Pacific Railroad in 1885 and that his sister had told him that he had been born there and the records destroyed. He also averred that in 1941 US Immigration had declared him native-born. Delmore also told the reporter he had spent thousands attempting to find his birth records but had come up empty.
Regardless, in 1953 the government moved ahead with deportation proceedings against Delmore, but he fought back in court, filing a suit to have himself declared a citizen. Over the course of the next two years, the court case brought by Delmore dragged on, as the government produced evidence supporting their contention that Delmore was in fact Nicola Amoruso from Italy. But the Italian family records that the government provided did not list the birth of Delmore’s sister, Felicia. That, coupled with the 1941 letter from the former commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, persuaded the judge to rule in October 1955 that Delmore was indeed a natural US citizen.
The seventy-five-year-old mob boss had avoided deportation and, despite his advancing age, still commanded respect in his borgata (branch of the Mafia) for his work ethic and golf game as much as anything else, as evidenced by a wiretapped conversation between Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo (identified in the transcripts as Ray) and Delmore’s underling Louis Larasso:
Ray: Does Nick [Delmore] hang around with youse at all any more?
Louis: No, he don’t come in at all.
Ray: He’s up early in the morning he told me; he goes to work.
Louis: Yeah, he’s down in the office a lot.
Ray: What’s that, heating systems?
Louis: Yeah.
. . .
Ray: He’s smart; that will keep him young. He’s about seventy-three or seventy-five and got all his wits.
Louis: Seventy-four. He golfs two or three days a week.
Ray: Yeah, he’s good too—eighty-two or eighty-three. Where does he play? Old Orchard yet?
Louis: Yeah, well, he goes all around.[8]
Another Elizabeth family soldier was caught on another wiretap around the same time saying, “Nick Delmore could come in this room and give three of us a battle,” with another adding, “Nick Delmore, at the age of seventy-five, went into a new business. He’s in good shape.”[9] Unfortunately, the wiseguy spoke too soon.
In the summer of 1963, the seventy-six-year-old Delmore suffered a heart attack. His fragile condition compounded with his advancing age forced Delmore to hand the family’s day-to-day operations over to his nephew, Simone Rizzo “Sam the Plumber” DeCavalcante, son of an old-time Elizabeth family member. After Delmore’s heart attack, DeCavalcante “announced
to a group of Union County gamblers that he was taking over as boss in his uncle’s absence.”[10] DeCavalcante’s ascension to the top spot became permanent when Nick Delmore died of pneumonia in the Monmouth Medical Center on February 3, 1964. DeCavalcante named longtime crime family member Frank Majuri as his underboss.
Sam DeCavalcante eschewed the Elizabeth neighborhood of Peterstown, favored by many of the crime family members, instead residing in the Princeton area in a decidedly suburban setting.[11] Sporting a salt-and-pepper moustache and combed-back, wavy hair, and always dressed in fine suits, Sam carried himself like a sophisticated mobster, always looking his best when the cameras caught him. His first arrest came when he was seventeen. He had been caught breaking into a store in Westfield, New Jersey. He was sentenced to time at the Rahway Reformatory and paroled in 1932. That following July, in 1933, DeCavalcante was chased by police for violating parole. After jumping over some hedges and hiding out in an attic in Bound Brook, New Jersey, he was arrested by Westfield police. It’s not clear whether or not he was sent back to prison for that run-in, but in 1938 he was arrested and charged with passing a bad check, again in Westfield.
It was soon after his check-cashing arrest that DeCavalcante was made into the Elizabeth family. He told one of his old cohorts, Anthony “Tony Boy” Boiardo, son of Richie the Boot, that he’d been made in the early 1940s, adding, “I was supposed to be made in Philadelphia,” referring to the Philly crime family. “I’ve been in as long as Jerry Catena has. I could have been made with Albert’s [Anastasia] outfit.”[12]
Garden State Gangland Page 10
