The Mob and the City

by C. Alexander Hortis

  In 1929, the City of New York started withdrawing public waste hauling for commercial businesses, viewing it as a public subsidy for private companies. This expanded the market for private waste haulers and, unintentionally, created a fat new target for racketeers.100

  The waste-hauling cartel originated in the mid-1930s when the mob organized the carting companies using a Teamsters local and “trade associations.” Mobster Joe Parisi created Teamsters Local 27 and retained Bernard Adelstein to serve as its president, even though Adelstein had no union experience and was an employer-side representative in the food industry. Meanwhile, the “Brooklyn Trade Waste Removers Association” (BTWRA) was organizing small carting companies. Soon political candidates were seeking the BTWRA's support, and officials like District Attorney William O'Dwyer were feting its president.101

  The Cosa Nostra used Adelstein's Teamsters union and trade associations to enforce cartels over customer routes. In a perversion of the market, the carting companies “owned” their customers. They fixed routes amongst themselves and charged inflated prices to their captive customers. In March 1947, the New York Commissioner of Investigation dissolved three trade waste associations in New York City for “restricting competition by dividing territory and fixing noncompetitive prices” and for “polic[ing] the industry in order to maintain their monopoly.” It made little difference; the cartels quickly re-emerged with newly labeled associations.102

  Vincent “Jimmy” Squillante ran the garbage cartel for the Mangano Family in New York City. Under the guise of the Greater New York Cartmen's Association, Squillante approached carters and promised to solve their labor problems based on his connections to Bernie Adelstein and Albert Anastasia. What Squillante was really offering was the customer allocation system. A carter recalled Squillante's candid explanation:

  [Squillante] brought out the point of what we call property rights. In the event a man has a customer or a stop…and that customer moves from that stop, that man claims that empty store and his customer. No matter what customer shall move back into that store, that man has the property rights. No other cartman can go in there and solicit the stop.103

  The Mafia's use of Bernie Adelstein's Teamsters local was integral to the scheme. When waste haulers asked why a union was needed for family-owned businesses with “a father and 2 or 3 sons” as employees, the mobster was blunt about the union's real purpose. “No one would take your customers due to the fact that the union would always step in,” Squillante explained.104

  The Cosa Nostra was looking for new territories for the garbage racket. So when the City of Yonkers withdrew public waste hauling from commercial establishments in 1949, mobsters were eager to expand to the affluent suburb. They met an immovable object.105

  Teamsters Local 456 of Westchester County

  John Acropolis was an unusual labor leader. He went to Colgate University on a basketball scholarship, and he became involved with unions while driving trucks in the summer. In 1941, Acropolis was part of a reform slate of candidates who overthrew the incumbents in union elections for Teamsters Local 456 in Westchester County. His strong will earned him the nickname “Little Caesar.” But Acropolis was a sincere unionist who ran a clean local.106

  4–3: Nicholas “Cockeyed Nick” Rattenni, ca. 1930. (Used by permission of the NYC Municipal Archives)

  Around 1950, mobsters Joe Parisi and Nick “Cockeyed Nick” Rattenni, and Bernie Adelstein of Teamsters Local 27, started muscling in on waste hauling in Westchester County. “They tried to talk us into giving Parisi—that is, local 27—the jurisdiction in Westchester County of all the private carting,” recounted Everett Doyle of Local 456. When Acropolis refused, they took more extreme measures. Adelstein's Teamsters started threatening to put storekeepers out of business unless they switched from Rex Carting, whose workers were represented by Local 456, to a mobbed-up carting company. Rex Carting's office was torched and its trucks burned. Still, Rex Carting and Local 456 continued to hold out.107

  2:00 a.m., August 26, 1952, Home of John Acropolis, Yonkers, New York

  In the summer of 1952, Joe Parisi and Bernie Adelstein tried to strongarm Acropolis and Doyle at a labor convention in Rochester. After Adelstein outright demanded that Acropolis and Local 456 surrender its representation of Rex Carting, they got into a heated argument:

  “You are not that tough. Don't think you are too tough we can't take care of you. Tougher guys than you have been taken care of,” Adelstein threatened.

  “It's too bad you are crippled or I would flatten you right here,” Acropolis replied angrily to the peg-legged Adelstein.

  Later, Parisi came up to Acropolis's hotel room. “I am through arguing with you,” Parisi intoned. “There is other ways of talking care of you [sic]. We can see that it is done.” Acropolis told him to get out of his room.108

  Back home, Acropolis and his fellow union officers started receiving threats over the phone. “Don't park the car when you go home in a dark spot,” they said. “Within the next week four of you are going to die.”109

  Two weeks after the Rochester labor convention, around 2 a.m. on August 26, 1952, John Acropolis was opening the door to his home after a long day. Before Acropolis could set down his car keys, someone shot him execution style twice in the back of the head.110 The local police conducted interviews and tried to investigate various mobsters, but they made little progress.111 The case has never been solved.

  With Acropolis gone, the mob quickly completed its takeover of waste hauling in Yonkers and the surrounding communities. For the next three decades, Nick Rattenni and his mob allies controlled 90 percent of the commercial waste hauling in Westchester County, reaping millions in inflated fees.112

  The Mafia's infiltration of labor unions in the 1930s was the turning point in its rise to power. While Prohibition was a thirteen-year binge, labor racketeering provided a steady diet of profits and power. Our next chapter looks at another new source of profits: the drug trade.

  My Tradition outlaws narcotics. It had always been understood that ‘men of honor’ don't deal in narcotics.

  —Joseph Bonanno, A Man of Honor (1983)

  Salvatore Lucania knew an opportunity when he saw one. He lined his pockets with heroin and morphine, and set out to work the Lower East Side. It was spring 1916. America had just declared its first war on drugs. When doctors stopped writing prescriptions for heroin, addicts filled the streets, desperate for new suppliers. Lucania would later say that he knew what “them kind of addicts looked like.” Approaching junkies, he “told them I had some.” After a string of deals, Lucania was arrested on East 14th Street for peddling to “a dope fiend.” He was convicted and spent six months in the reformatory. But prison did not reform him. In June 1923, Lucania sold heroin to an informant for federal narcotics agents. To save himself, he tipped off the agents to a trunk of narcotics at 163 Mulberry Street in Little Italy.1

  Lucania spent the next decade scheming his way through Prohibition. He soon traded the streets for a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, where he ran his operations as “Charles Ross.” But “Charles Ross” would become better known as Mafia boss Charles “Lucky” Luciano.2

  Luciano's drug record did not slow his rise to the top. Even when he was a boss, Luciano kept narcotics traffickers among his closest associates. This has been all but forgotten. Today, Luciano is lionized as the purported architect of the Cosa Nostra. Time named Luciano as one of its “100 Persons of the Century.” When Luciano's drug record is discussed at all, it is usually dismissed as a youthful indiscretion, or as a sign of his disrespect for Mafia tradition.3 It is never considered a reflection of the Mafia itself.

  The first question for this chapter then is: How has the Mafia obscured its role in America's drug trade? The chapter examines the Mafia mythology on drugs. The second, bigger question is: What was its actual relationship to the narcotics trade? The chapter uses facts to peel back the myths.4

  THE DRUGS SCENE FROM THE GODFATHER

  It i
s one of the most evocative scenes from The Godfather. The dons from around the country are assembled around a dark table. They have come to resolve whether the Mafia will enter the drug trade. The younger dons push the aging Don Vito Corleone of New York (played by the great Marlon Brando) to give his approval. He warns them against it:

  I believe this drug business—is gonna destroy us in the years to come. I mean, it's not like gambling or liquor—even women—which is something that most people want nowadays, and is, ah, forbidden to them by the pezzonovante of the Church. Even the police departments that've helped us in the past with gambling and other things are gonna refuse to help us when it comes to narcotics.

  The traditional Don Corleone, however, is outnumbered by his greedier colleagues. Don Zaluchi of Detroit rises to present the pro-drug rationale:

  I also don't believe in drugs. For years I paid my people extra so they wouldn't do that kind of business. Somebody comes to them and says, “I have powders; if you put up three, four thousand dollar investment—we can make fifty thousand distributing.” So they can't resist.

  Zaluchi proposes a compromise:

  I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable….

  BAM! [slamming his hand on the table]:

  I don't want it near schools—I don't want it sold to children! That's an infamia. In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people—the colored. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.

  Don Barzini of Brooklyn sums up their resolution, “Traffic in drugs will be permitted, but controlled.” In the end, though, Don Corleone prevails by killing his greedy, racist rivals.5

  This iconic scene from the 1972 masterpiece planted indelible images. When a young Sammy “The Bull” Gravano saw it, it reflected his ideal beliefs in the Cosa Nostra. “It was basically the way I saw the life. Where there was some honor. Like when Don Corleone, Marlon Brando, says about the drugs, sure, he owned these people, but he would lose them with that,” said Gravano.6 Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola were drawing on Mafia mythology on drugs when they created this scene. The three major myths are crystalized in it.

  The Myth of a Traditional Ban

  The Mafia first denied having anything to do with drugs as a matter of tradition. Its members may have been bootleggers and bookies, but not dope pushers. In The Godfather, this myth is embodied in the character of Don Corleone, the traditional mafioso who stands against drugs. We can call this the myth of a traditional ban.

  Mafiosi have long declared that they stayed out of drugs. In his bestselling autobiography A Man of Honor, Mafia boss Joseph Bonanno asserted, “My Tradition outlaws narcotics. It had always been understood that ‘men of honor’ don't deal in narcotics.” Bonanno claimed that he “did not tolerate any dealings in prostitution or narcotics.”7 When Frank Costello was under investigation in 1946, he held a press conference and declared, “I detest the narcotic racket and anyone connected with it. To my mind there is no one lower than a person dealing in it. It is low and filthy-trading on human misery.” Similarly, when Thomas Lucchese testified before the New York State Crime Commission in 1952, he “reserved his real indignation” for drug traffickers. “Any man who got a family should die before he goes into any of that kind of business,” Lucchese insisted.8

  The Myth of Generational Decline

  As the drug convictions mounted, the families tried to blame it all on low-level, young button men. In The Godfather, this myth is articulated by Don Zaluchi, who laments that his soldiers were succumbing to drug money. We can call this the myth of generational decline.

  Joe Bonanno argued that “the lure of high profits had tempted some underlings to freelance in the narcotics trade.” He suggested this was due to a generational decline. “It reflected how much ground our Traditional values had lost,” said Bonanno. His son, Bill Bonanno, echoed his father's sentiments, saying, “The ultimate prospect of big profits far outweighed the lingering attraction of old traditions—at least in the minds of newer leaders who were coming up through the Families.”9 Angelo Lonardo, a former underboss in Cleveland, struck similar themes in his testimony before a Senate Committee in 1988:

  It has changed since I first joined in the 1940s, and, especially, in the last few years with the growth of narcotics. Greed is causing younger members to go into narcotics without the knowledge of the Families. These younger members lack the discipline and respect that made “This Thing” as strong as it once was.

  When asked about the timing of this shift, Lonardo pinned it on “the late sixties or seventies.” Ironically, Lonardo himself was a convicted narcotics trafficker.10

  The Myth of Control

  Others have rationalized away the Mafia's involvement in narcotics by suggesting that at least the mob controlled the drug trade as a business. This myth is articulated by Don Zaluchi (“I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable”), and Don Barzini (“Traffic in drugs will be permitted, but controlled”). The image of a grand conclave of the Mafia deciding the future of the drug trade suggests omnipotent power. We can call this the myth of control.

  Writers have portrayed the entire drug trade as being controlled by a few, all-powerful mafiosi. In Martin Gosch and Richard Hammer's fictionalized “memoirs” of Lucky Luciano, The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, Luciano purportedly makes an offer to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) to “shut off the supply to America.”11 Joe Bonanno blamed the police's foiling of the Mafia's 1957 conference in Apalachin, New York, for stymieing a mob ban on narcotics. “If the 1957 meeting had gone according to plan there no doubt would have been a reaffirmation of our Tradition's opposition to narcotics,” claimed Bonanno.12 As we will see, politicians have contributed to this myth by blaming the entire drug trade on a single person or mob conclave.

  THE HISTORICAL RECORD OF THE MAFIA AND DRUGS

  Almost nothing about the Mafia mythology on drugs is true. There was no longstanding “tradition” against drug dealing. Mafiosi were involved in illegal narcotics almost from the beginning. Nor was the trafficking confined to younger, low-level underlings. And contrary to the myth of control, the drug trade was messy and haphazard. Ultimately, the Mafia flooded New York City and the country with narcotics. This is how they did it.

  When Narcotics Were Legal, 1890–1914

  When Leroy Street needed a fix, he went to the pharmacist on Avenue B who sold him heroin manufactured by Bayer of Germany. Bayer's heroin was so pure that Leroy had to dilute it with milk sugar before injecting it into his vein. “There was one drugstore that gave us Christmas presents,” Street remembered. “It was really something: a brand-new, shining hypodermic needle with a little ribbon around it and a little card, ‘Merry Christmas.’”13

  New York City was an addict's paradise; drugs were cheap, easy, and everywhere. Without state or federal restrictions on heroin or cocaine, many “medicines” were little more than bottles of opiates. Coca-Cola put cocaine in its soda until 1903. And it was all legal.14

  Narcotics were, in fact, legal throughout most of the Mafia's early existence. As a British official observed, through World War I “the supply of drugs for purposes of abuse…was in most countries not actually illegal.”15 The New York State legislature did not enact its first laws against cocaine and heroin trafficking until 1913–1914, and the US Congress did not do so until the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. Even then, the importation of heroin into the United States was not banned completely until 1924.16 Meanwhile, Italy did not pass its first narcotics law until 1923, a weak law with a maximum penalty of six months.17

  The Mafia could not have had a longstanding “tradition” against illegal narcotics trafficking because there was no such thing. When Joe Bonanno waxes on that “it had always been understood that ‘men of honor’ don't deal in narcotics,” we have to wonder whether his memories were clouded by nostalgia or intentional misdirection. Bonanno was eighteen years old before narcotics were made illegal in his native Italy. Bayer was lawfully supplying the
world with heroin. So if there was some virgin era when the Mafia eschewed drug dealing, it was practically meaningless. We should dispense with the myth of tradition.

  THE DAWN OF THE DRUG PROHIBITION, 1915–1939

  Drug prohibition made New York City the center of the transatlantic drug trade. Enormous amounts of narcotics flowed through the Port of New York in the 1920s and ’30s. Smugglers didn't move kilos; they moved tons. Around Christmas 1928, a ton of narcotics was found in packing cases labeled as brushes. In April 1931, agents confiscated three tons of narcotics from a liner docked on the Chelsea piers. The Elias and George Eliopoulos brothers reputedly only sold narcotics in lots of a hundred kilos or more.18

  Although traffickers of every ethnicity engaged in the drug trade, Jewish gangsters initially led the trade in New York. Arnold Rothstein was the most significant trafficker in the 1920s, though he probably never touched an ounce of heroin himself. After Rothstein was shot in the Park Central Hotel in 1928, investigators found in his safe deposit boxes the financial records of his drug smuggling. (True to myth, Rothstein's widow claimed her husband's attitude to narcotics was “one of repugnance.”)19 His deputies Irving Sobel and Yasha Katzenberg had organized new smuggling routes from Europe and Southeast Asia. The racketeer Louis “Lepke” Buchalter meanwhile had a morphine plant in the Bronx.20

  Italian drug syndicates followed closely behind the Jewish traffickers. In the 1910s, the New York Kehillah, a Jewish community organization, hired a private investigator to report on criminal activities. When the historian Alan Block analyzed the reports on drug trafficking, he found that after Jews (31 percent), the Italians were the second largest ethnic group in the cocaine trade (8 percent), and they were the only other group that formed drug syndicates. Jews and Italians often worked in combinations in a market that was “fragmented, kaleidoscopic and sprawling.”21

  The emergence of Italian drug syndicates is confirmed by other sources as well. Prosecutions of the Brooklyn-based Camorra (mainland Italy's counterpart to the Sicilian Mafia) revealed that the Camorristas were heavily involved in cocaine dealing in the 1910s.22 A 1917 report on drug trafficking found that “‘Little Italy,’ in east Harlem, is perhaps as large a market as any.” Leroy Street, the addict who lived through the dawn of the drug war, confirms an early Italian presence: “The Italians were involved in the beginning,” he recalled.23