The Mob and the City

by C. Alexander Hortis

  Manhattan's many small bars and restaurants were sitting targets for extortionists. Racketeers would toss “stink bombs” into lunchtime crowds to drive off customers and bring resistant owners into line. In the mid-1930s, the mobster Dutch Schultz and union leaders forced restaurants into the Metropolitan Restaurant and Cafeteria Owners Association; the owners paid $1,500 in “associational dues” to protect themselves against sham strikes.70

  Mafiosi also liked to acquire hidden interests in restaurants through coercive partnerships. While Tommy Morton was the owner of record of a restaurant called The Azores, his silent partner was mob boss Thomas Lucchese. “[Tommy] must have fronted for lots of wiseguys. But he also had to pay back a certain amount every week to his partners,” explained Henry Hill, a Lucchese associate. “That's the way it is with a wiseguy partner. He gets his money, no matter what. You got no business? Fuck you, pay me.”71

  The taxicabs that drove the restaurant goers back to their apartments or hotels were easy targets for gangsters as well. Roughly 5,600 cabs in New York belonged to single-cab companies, where the owner was typically the driver himself. “Mobsters try to bully you and order you around,” complained a cabbie during the 1940s.72 Mafioso Frankie Carbo actually killed a taxi driver.73 Racketeers were so pervasive that even the International Brotherhood of Teamsters refused to issue union charters to taxis. The Teamsters’ top official in New York warned that the industry was full of “all sorts of gorillas.”74

  NEW YORK'S FRAGILE INDUSTRIES IN FOOD

  Many of the foods supplied to those restaurants, and to the dinner tables of New Yorkers, were subject to illegal cartels. Nearly all their food was grown elsewhere, shipped by freight trains, and trucked through the narrow streets of the city. In 1913, a report cautioned that New York's food-distribution facilities were misplaced and outdated, but “the downtown terminals have developed into well recognized markets.”75

  Trade associations, teamsters, and gangsters schemed to fix food prices in New York City. In 1909, members of the Milk Dealers’ Protective Association conspired to raise the price of milk about eight cents a quart by cutting off independent dealers from milk supplies. The gangster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter was convicted of using the Flour Truckmen's Association to extort payoffs from bakeries during the 1930s. Racketeers even organized the ice business, vital before refrigeration, into price-fixing conspiracies.76

  The wholesale meat markets in Brooklyn and the Bronx were beset by labor racketeers connected to the Mafia. Max Block of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union explained how he exploited the timing of the kosher meat market. “We stopped the trucks on a Monday, a busy day when they normally slaughtered about two hundred steers. Meanwhile, because it had to be fresh, they were supposed to move the kosher meat every day. But now they couldn't move the meat,” bragged Block. When he was organizing the wholesale market in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Block reached an understanding with the Gambino Family. “Fort Greene was all wholesalers. You had mostly Italians hanging out there. Mostly the tough guys. That's where I met Carlo Gambino,” Block explained. “So when the bosses went to the tough guys, the Italian fellows, they already knew us. We were buddies.”77 Later, the McClellan Committee uncovered evidence that Block sold out his union's interests by cutting collusive deals with companies. The Gambino Family continued to hold interests in New York's meat markets into the 1980s.78

  Humble vegetables became the objects of racketeering, too. Each day, five hundred carloads of produce grown in California and the Midwest arrived by train at the Bronx Terminal Market and a few other smaller terminals. Teamsters then maneuvered the produce through the canyons of Lower Manhattan to the twelve-block-long Washington Street Fruit and Vegetable Market, the largest wholesale market in the country. Gangsters went after weak links in the food chain.79

  Mafioso Ciro Terranova of the Morello Family made his name with the miniature artichoke, a favorite of southern Italian cooking. In the 1910s, Terranova used strongarm tactics to gain control of artichoke shipments into the city. Eyeing his success, the Brooklyn-based Camorra (mainland Italy's equivalent of Sicily's Mafia) moved in on the artichoke racket, leading to a bizarre vegetable war on the streets of New York in 1916.80

  After prevailing over the Camorra, Terranova expanded his control by going to the source. He used his front corporation, the Union Pacific Produce Company both to purchase artichokes as soon they arrived at the Bronx Terminal Market and to scare off other potential buyers from the market. After monopolizing the artichoke supply, he jacked up the price to wholesalers, who passed it on to retailers and consumers. In December 1935, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia shrewdly targeted “the Artichoke King” as a brazen monopolist of a popular food. La Guardia publicly suspended the sale of artichokes until all dealers agreed not to deal with the Union Pacific Produce Company, and he had the police literally drive Terranova out of the city. Within days, the retail price of artichokes dropped 30 percent, unveiling the size the “mob tax.”81

  This was a city built for the mob. But there were many people vying for the rackets. Next, we will look at Prohibition, and the rise of the Sicilian gangs during the 1920s.

  I am not rich.

  —Joe Masseria, on trial for burglary in People against Masseria, May 15, 1913

  The police declare that both [Umberto] Valenti and [Joe] Masseria were millionaires.

  —New York Evening Telegram, August 11, 1922

  SUNDAY, APRIL 13, 1913, HOLDING CELL, POLICE STATION HOUSE, MULBERRY STREET, MANHATTAN: JOE MASSERIA'S BURGLARY RING

  “What was I to do? Shoot?” said the burglar, in Italian, to his three partners. They were stewing in the holding cell of the Twelfth Precinct Station House in Little Italy, Manhattan.1

  “Yes, you should have taken a—” responded one of the men.

  “Why, they only found one gun,” the burglar said.

  “No, they found two,” corrected the other man.

  “No, I know positive he only found one,” the burglar insisted defensively.

  The leader of the ring tried to calm everyone down. “We were to get diamonds and we get backhouse,” he lamented, referring to the poor man's toilet. He then sounded a note of unity: “Four we were and four we are.”2

  Joe Masseria and his three partners in crime had been arrested that Sunday morning, April 13, 1913, on the charge of the burglary of Simpson's pawnbrokers at 146 Bowery Street in Lower Manhattan. With him in the cell were Pietro “Pete the Bum” Lagatutta and the brothers Salvatore and Giuseppe Ruffino of Brooklyn. None of the “four we are” would flip and give evidence to the police about anyone else in the hope of reducing their charge. They would soon go on trial for first-degree burglary.3

  Looking at him in the prison cell that Sunday, no one would have predicted that Joe Masseria would someday become the capo di capi or “boss of bosses” of the Mafia. It would have not been considered much of a title anyway. In the 1910s, the Italian gangs were near the bottom of the underworld. Within a decade, however, Joe Masseria would be one of New York's most powerful gangsters, and the Mafia families were on their way to becoming the dominant crime syndicates in Gotham.

  This chapter begins with an overview of the dismal state of the Italian gangs in the 1910s. It looks at the rather sad early “careers” of three gangsters: Joe Masseria, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, and Giuseppe Morello. Next, it looks at how the Prohibition era (1920–1933) helped fuel their ascents and that of the Mafia generally. The chapter then presents three other large-scale factors that accelerated the Mafia's growth beginning in the 1920s. These include: the surge of South Italian immigration to New York, the development of the Mafia franchise system, and the advent of new technologies like the telephone and automobile.

  THE HUMBLE BEGINNINGS OF GIUSEPPE “JOE THE BOSS” MASSERIA

  Giuseppe Masseria had been looking for a big score since coming to America. Born January 17, 1886, in the southwest province of Agrigento, Sicily, he immigrated to New York City as a teenager in 1902 and li
ved in the rough-and-tumble Mulberry Bend on the Lower East Side.

  A natural leader, Masseria was aggressive, fearless, and physically agile. A stout 5 feet, 4 inches, Masseria had black hair, puffy cheeks, and several gold teeth. Good work in the rackets was sparse for young Italians, however, and he struggled to make it on high-risk, strongarm crimes. He racked up arrests for assault and extortion; in 1909, he was convicted of burglary and given a suspended sentence.4

  Masseria had his sights on Simpson's pawnbroking establishment near Little Italy. Simpson's was no low-rent pawnshop. It was a three-story building with a Holmes electric security system and a safe deposit vault holding $300,000 worth of diamonds and other valuables (about $7 million in present dollars).5 Pietro Lagatutta rented an apartment that shared a backyard with Simpson's. During a rainstorm on the night of Saturday, April 12, 1913, the burglars used a ladder to scale a dugout behind the Simpson's building and drilled a hole in the rear brick wall. Once inside, they planned to crack the vault.

  Unfortunately for them, a beat cop saw a blanket stuffed in the wall of Simpson's. Early Sunday morning, police on surveillance stopped the men as they tried to leave Lagatutta's apartment. While Masseria was dressed in a brown suit and derby hat, the other men had raincoats with wet brick dust. They were all arrested and charged with burglary.6

  MAY 15, 1913, COURT OF SPECIAL SESSIONS, MANHATTAN: THE TRIAL OF MASSERIA

  Masseria testified on his own behalf at trial. Although his English was good enough for the judge to dispense with the interpreter, Masseria was out of his element in the staid courtroom. “Before I speak to you and Mr. District Attorney I want to tell something to the judge,” said Masseria, bursting with energy. “Now, you sit perfectly still and just answer questions,” the judge instructed.7

  “I am not rich,” Masseria later testified. This was embarrassingly true. Masseria lived with his mother until she passed away, then he moved his wife and children into a room in a tenement owned by his brother-in-law and sister at 217 Forsythe Street on the Lower East Side. Masseria was the barkeep for his sister's saloon across the street.8

  The trial went badly. The prosecutor had a lot of physical evidence, including the new technology of a “finger-print” impression of Lagatutta inside Simpson's. Masseria tried to explain his presence at Lagatutta's apartment at 7:00 Sunday morning, testifying that he stopped by looking for help “to work in the saloon on Sunday.” The jury convicted after only ninety minutes of deliberation. The judge sentenced Masseria to the maximum-security prison at Ossining, New York—the infamous Sing Sing—where he would spend the next four-and-a-half years. On January 17, 1916, Masseria reached the age of thirty in prison. He had two felony convictions, three young children, and few prospects in sight.9

  SALVATORE LUCANIA: PETTY CROOK LIVING AT HOME, 1910–1919

  Another young Sicilian immigrant was struggling to get by as a petty crook in New York during the 1910s. Born Salvatore Lucania on November 24, 1897, Charles Luciano was the middle child of a family from Lercara Friddi, a depressed mining town southeast of Palermo. His father was among the waves of Sicilian men who left for work in the manufacturing metropolis of New York City, bringing over nine-year-old Salvatore and the rest of the family in 1907. They lived in a tenement on East 10th Street, a polyglot area of Russian Jewish, Southern Italian, and other later-arriving immigrants.10

  Recently rediscovered prison reports, which were based in part on interviews with Luciano himself, provide insight on his “formative years.” Luciano's parents were a respectable, working-class married couple with no history of criminality, mental illness, or major alcoholism. Nevertheless, they found themselves with an incorrigible son, who was sent to reform school for truancy and juvenile delinquency. He dropped out of school permanently at the age of fourteen in 1912.11

  Charlie then went through jobs like a tour of Manhattan's manufacturing industries. He stuffed dolls in a doll factory, labored alongside his father in a brass factory, pressed dresses in a garment shop, worked in the fish market, and prepared shipments for the Goodman Hat Company. “He admits he did not like to work so never held a job for any length of time,” read a prison report. Luciano would learn how to extract money from such industries through racketeering.12

  But for now, he simply wanted to find easier ways to make money. Luciano's psychiatric evaluations found he was an “egocentric, antisocial type,” and “rather a socio-path than a psychopath,” who chose the criminal life. Aptitude tests found him to have “bright intelligence,” and a report noted his “calmness at times of stress” and “reserve and strength.” (Essentially, the exact opposite of his portrayal as a hotheaded buffoon in HBO's Boardwalk Empire). These traits eventually brought him respect in the underworld.13

  There was something else: Luciano's coolly indifferent, nihilistic view of life. “He manifests a peasant-like faith in chance and has developed an attitude of nonchalance.”14

  This good-time Charlie said he “liked luxury,” spending freely on high-class hotels and nightclubs, platinum jewelry, and beautiful women. Unlike most mafiosi, he never married or had children. At age fourteen, he lost his virginity and caught gonorrhea, the first of seven cases of gonorrhea and two cases of syphilis. Luciano did have common-law relations for six years with a special woman, but they never married because he “couldn't get along with the girl.”15

  2–1: Charles Luciano, 1928. (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)

  Luciano's drooping right eye, caused by a vicious cutting of his face by assailants, reinforced this appearance of indifference. His nickname “Charles Lucky” was a play on his surname and his fortunes. Luciano later admitted to a psychiatrist that he had been arrested dozens of times (including several never made public) but was able “to free himself from most of these charges and because of this was nicknamed Lucky.”16

  “Charles Lucky” saw himself as a gambler. Though he would later become a bootlegger and labor racketeer, controlling trucking in the Garment Center, when Luciano was asked about his profession, he usually said “bookmaker” or “gambling.” He would purchase a place in upstate New York, and he spent summer months at the Saratoga Springs racetrack betting on the ponies. To avoid the fate of Al Capone, Luciano's lawyers filed federal income tax returns in which he listed “miscellaneous” income. “I'm a gambler. That's my profession,” he brashly told IRS examiners. Like any good gambler, Luciano was at ease taking huge, calculated risks in the underworld.17

  These traits would come in handy in the years to come. But that was all in the distant future. Through the late 1910s, Salvatore Lucania was just another petty crook with a record. At age twenty-two, he was still living at home with his parents on East 10th Street.18

  THE MORELLO FAMILY IN SHAMBLES, 1910–1919

  Meanwhile, the small Mafia of New York City was in shambles as well. The first substantial Sicilian cosca (or clan) in New York was led by Giuseppe “The Clutch Hand” Morello, his brother-in-law Ignazio “The Wolf” Lupo, and Morello's three half-brothers Ciro, Nick, and Vincenzo Terranova. The Morello Family barely survived on petty extortion, horse thievery, and insurance fraud. A few of its leaders graduated to early racketeering by using threats and extortion to control shipping and access to the wholesale vegetable markets in early 1900s.19

  Then, the Morellos made a disastrous mistake: in 1909, they got caught counterfeiting US currency. Disastrous because, while the Morellos might be able to bribe local officials, counterfeiting fell under the federal jurisdiction of the US Secret Service. In 1910, the Morello Family, which never totaled more than 110 men, including its associates, saw 45 of its men convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. All their legal appeals failed, and their convictions were affirmed.20

  The hardest fall was Giuseppe Morello. Besides being the head of his own family, Morello held the title of capo di capi or “boss of bosses” of the American Mafia. After being sent to prison, Morello lost that tit
le to Salvatore D'Aquila, a former confidence man and gang leader in East Harlem. Morello's underboss Ignazio Lupo went away with him, too. With their leadership decimated, the remnants of the Morello Family came under attack from a Brooklyn-based Camorra gang (whose members were from the Naples area of Italy), which began trying to kill off the Morello's remaining men and poach their territories.21

  The Morello Family prisoners grew increasingly desperate as their sentences wore on at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Mislead by their ability to pay off local police, they convinced themselves that influence might spring them from federal prison. They banked their hopes on an Italian politician from the Lower East Side who apparently promised them that “an attempt will be made to pass a law in Congress” to help them. When that fizzled out, they next retained a lawyer who claimed he was “cousin of the President's Secretary,” and put $5,000 in deposit “for the lawyer after Morello is released.” It did not work. Giuseppe Morello wasted away in the Atlanta federal prison for a full decade, until he was finally released in 1920, a gaunt and penniless man.22

  PROHIBITION NEW YORK, 1920–1933

  Then came Prohibition. At 12:01 a.m., Saturday, January 17, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution went into effect, prohibiting “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within…the United States.” The new Prohibition Unit was given the task of enforcing the federal law, with only fifteen hundred enforcement agents initially for the entire United States. “Detailed plans have been made to carry out the law in cities, such as New York,” the New York Times reported. “Fifty men are said to have been assigned to New York.”23

  New Yorkers rejected Prohibition in massive numbers by continuing to buy beer and booze. Law enforcement was quickly overwhelmed. The federal court in Manhattan held “cafeteria court” hearings where two hundred defendants at a time were brought before a judge to plead guilty and pay fines averaging $25. Responding to the public backlash, the New York State Legislature repealed its state “dry” law in June 1923. Gotham thus became the symbolic capital of drinking in America. As a Prohibition report said, “New York is considered the most conspicuous example of a wet city.”24