The Mob and the City

by C. Alexander Hortis

  IN SEARCH OF A GRAND CONSPIRACY

  Politicians and writers have searched for a single, grand conspiracy to explain the entire drug trade. In the 1950s, FBN Commissioner Harry Anslinger and his deputy Charles Siragusa claimed that Luciano was secretly the “the kingpin” of all the narcotics traffic between “the United States and Italy.”71 However, when the drug historians Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen reviewed the FBN's massive surveillance records on Luciano in Italy, they found no evidence that the aging Luciano controlled the transatlantic trade. In my examination of Anslinger's personal papers, I found no prized document showing Luciano pulling the strings of the drug trade from Italy.72

  Others have seized on a meeting at the Hotel et des Palmes in Palermo, Sicily, in October 1957. The FBI had long known about this meeting of a dozen Sicilian and America mafiosi, including Joe Bonanno and Carmine Galante. FBI director Louis Freeh later speculated that the meeting was held to enlist the Sicilian Mafia in the drug trade.73 In her 1990 book Octopus: How the Long Reach of the Sicilian Mafia Controls the Global Narcotics Trade, the journalist Claire Sterling saw in this meeting the organization of the entire drug trade:

  Although there is no firsthand evidence of what went on at the four-day summit itself, what followed over the next thirty years has made the substance clear. Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are persuaded by now that the American delegation asked the Sicilians to take over the import and distribution of heroin in the United States, and the Sicilians agreed.74

  This has been recycled endlessly, most recently by the writer Gil Reavill who cites Sterling's story even while admitting it is a “largely unsourced account.”75

  But there was firsthand evidence of what went on at the 1957 gathering. Tomasso Buscetta was one of the dozen mafioso at the Hotel et des Palmes. Buscetta later became a pentito (penitent witness) after his sons were killed, and he was the key witness in the “Pizza Connection” heroin prosecution of the 1980s. Buscetta never testified that the 1957 gathering was a “summit” to plan a direct Sicily-to-America heroin connection. No such connection was established for another two decades. Wiseguys do not have twenty-year drug plans.76

  These writers miss the point. No single cabal could predetermine the entire drug trade. There was conspiracy in the drug trade. But it was not a single grand conspiracy by a few, omnipotent men. Rather, the drug trade involved many small conspiracies, composed of fluid coalitions of mafiosi who put together schemes as the opportunities arose.

  MAFIA DRUG OPERATIONS

  Joseph Orsini treated countries like his mistresses. A native Corsican, he was convicted of collaborating with the Nazis, and fled France for the United States. In January 1949, he met Salvatore “Sally Shields” Shillitani, a member of the Lucchese Family, and proposed they go into business together. Orsini brought in his Corsican drug contacts; Shillitani brought in his fellow mafiosi. All the partners invested money in a fund to finance their operations. The ring met in restaurants, hotel rooms, a construction company office—even on Ellis Island, as Orsini awaited deportation to Argentina for immigration violations.77

  To get heroin to New York, the ring constantly adapted. One of the Corsicans had a connection for opium in Yugoslavia. He shipped the opium to Marseilles, where it was converted into morphine then shipped to Paris to be processed into heroin. The ring then sent Americans with automobiles on “vacations” to Paris, where the cars were loaded up with heroin in hidden caches and shipped back to the United States. The ring was hardly flawless. Investors squabbled over deliveries. The automobile scheme was shut down when too many cars were returning empty. One disastrous day, French police seized a three-hundred-kilo shipment from a boat docked in Marseilles. But because the ring's “merchandise” was so perfect, it still made profits from the kilos that made it to New York.78

  The Orsini-Shillitani ring was fairly typical of Mafia drug rings. Table 5–1 summarizes characteristics of Mafia drug operations for which we have good information. First, the drug rings involved many different coconspirators. Second, they were financed by several mafiosi pooling their money. Third, the drug rings were opportunistic. Traffickers crossed Mafia family lines, bought from whatever source was available, and smuggled in the drugs by any means necessary.

  THE FRENCH (CANADIAN) CONNECTION

  When viewed against this background, the famous “French Connection” case of the early 1960s looks less the mark of something new and more like any other Mafia drug operation. The case was immortalized by William Friedkin's 1971 Academy Award–winning film The French Connection starring Gene Hackman. The reporter who wrote the book on which the film was based trumpeted the case as “The World's Most Crucial Narcotics Investigation.”81 It wasn't.

  In reality, the scheme was a small, family affair involving Pasquale “Patsy” Fuca, his brother Joe, and his father Tony. Patsy's uncle was Angelo “Little Angie” Tuminaro, a trafficker for the Lucchese Family. With their Corsican partners, they refined Turkish opium into heroin in Marseilles. They concealed the heroin in the undercarriage of a 1960 Buick Invicta owned by a Parisian television host, who shipped his car to Montreal, Canada. After smuggling the packages across the border, they stashed the ninety-seven pounds of heroin in cellars around New York.82

  The case might have been called the French-Canadian Connection to reflect the Mafia's latest adaptation to the drug war. The Canadian Mafia long had its own drug trade. Canadian boss Rocco Perri's associates were into narcotics trafficking as early as the 1920s.83 When customs enforcement increased on the New York waterfront in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the wiseguys looked north for new drug routes. “When the heat was being put on New York [traffickers would] swing through French Canada because of all the [Montreal] air traffic,” explained Ralph Salerno.84 This gave rise to mob traffickers like Frank and Joseph Controni of Montreal, and Albert and Vito Agueci of Toronto, who smuggled drugs through Canada to New York City.85

  NARCOTICS CONVICTIONS OF MAFIOSI, 1916–1963

  The Mafia's entrenchment in the narcotics trade is also reflected in conviction rates. Table 5–3 below shows mafiosi from the New York metropolitan area convicted on drug charges. To address the myth of generational decline, the table is limited to mafiosi who were both born by 1920 and convicted by 1963. This places them in the same generation as the leading purveyors of this myth, Joe Bonanno (born 1905) and Angelo Lonardo (born 1911). The pre-1963 time limitation counters the perception that Mafia trafficking only began with the French Connection case, or as Lonardo put it “the late sixties or seventies.”

  As the table shows, more than 150 mafiosi in the New York area alone were convicted on narcotics violations by 1963. Given that Joe Valachi testified there were about two thousand active and twenty-five hundred inactive members in the New York area, this meant that one in thirty-three mafiosi were convicted traffickers. This is astounding given how weak narcotics enforcement was at the time. As late as 1950, the NYPD's narcotics squad had 18 officers; in 1965, the FBN had only 433 employees nationwide. Many mob traffickers evaded the law. Valachi estimated that about “75 tops, maybe 100” in the 450-man Genovese Family were into narcotics—about one in six.86

  MAFIA LEADERS INVOLVED IN DRUGS

  Contrary to myth, drug trafficking was not confined to low-level mobsters. Table 5–2 below shows that all five families had high-ranking leaders with early narcotics convictions:

  Table 5–2: Known Leaders of the New York Families with Narcotics Convictions (≤ 1963)

  Individual (earliest narcotics conviction) Top Position Obtained Family

  Charles “Lucky” Luciano (1916) Boss Genovese

  Dominick “Quiet Dom” Cirillo (1953) Boss Genovese

  Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno (1958) Boss Genovese

  Vito Genovese (1959) Boss Genovese

  Vincent “The Chin” Gigante (1959) Boss Genovese

  Natale “Diamond Joe” Evola (1959) Boss Bonanno

  Carmine “Lilo” Galante (1962) Boss Bonanno />
  Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo (1941) Boss Lucchese

  Salvatore “Tom Mix” Santoro (1952) Underboss Lucchese

  Stephen Armone (1935) Caporegime Gambino

  Joseph “Joe Piney” Armone (≤1963) Caporegime Gambino

  Joseph “Jo Jo” Manfredi (1952) Caporegime Gambino

  Rocco Mazzie (1959) Caporegime Gambino

  John “Big John” Ormento (1937) Caporegime Lucchese

  Nicholas “Jiggs” Forlano (1935) Caporegime Magliocco

  The bosses profited from narcotics behind the scenes, too. Nicolo Gentile's boss Vincent Mangano approved of Gentile's drug trafficking scheme in exchange for a split of the profits.87 Joe Valachi recalls a highly revealing conversation he once had with his boss, Vito Genovese:

  He said to me, “Did you ever deal in junk?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  He said, “You know you ain't supposed to fool with it.”

  Vito looked at me and said, “Well, don't do it again.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Of course, I don't pay any attention to this. This is how Vito was.88

  This veiled conversation shows how easily a mob boss could look the other way.

  Joe Bonanno's pontifications on drugs are undermined by some damning facts as well. Bonanno portrays his “hero” Salvatore Maranzano as the quintessential “Man of Honor.” Yet as we saw earlier, Maranzano had a convicted drug trafficker in James Alescia as a partner at his Park Avenue office. Bonanno offers no explanation for Maranzano and Alescia.89

  “I did not tolerate any dealings in prostitution or narcotics,” Bonanno claimed when he was boss. But in 1959, Carmine “Lilo” Galante, a caporegime in the Bonanno Family, was arrested and later convicted for smuggling heroin through the Montreal airport and into New York City.90 Not only was Galante left untouched, but he later became acting boss of the Bonanno Family.91 Joe Bonanno conveniently omits any mention of Galante in his autobiography Man of Honor. Bill Bonanno tries to shore up his father's omission in Bill's own 1991 autobiography Bound by Honor. Bill admits that Galante was a trafficker, but claims his father had no forewarning:

  My father was heartbroken by this, although unwilling to do anything about it. There was a standing death sentence for anyone who openly defied an ironclad rule of the Family—such as the one against dealing drugs.

  “Leave him alone; doesn't matter now,” my father told me and those in the administration of the Family.

  Bill Bonanno claims that he “would have struck out in retaliation” against Galante. However, in a 1979 New York Times article, Bill Bonanno is quoted as saying that Carmine Galante “was like an uncle,” and that Bill was a “godfather to one of [Galante's] children.”92

  Then there is Natale “Joe Diamond” Evola. Natale Evola was an usher at Joe Bonanno's wedding, and the Bonannos lionize Evola as one of the “boys of the first day.” In 1959, however, Evola was convicted for a narcotics conspiracy. Nevertheless, Evola became boss of the Bonanno Family in the 1970s, and the Bonannos say nothing of his drug record.93 The facts, it seems, would have gotten in the way of a good myth.

  POLICE CORRUPTION

  Don Corleone was wrong about the police refusing to help, too. The FBN, in fact, was borne out of a corruption scandal in its predecessor agency, the old Narcotics Bureau. In 1930, a grand jury in New York charged narcotics agents with rampant misconduct and falsification of cases under its commissioner Levi Nutt. But what brought Nutt down were the revelations that his son-in-law took a loan from Arnold Rothstein, the biggest narcotics trafficker in the country, and that Nutt's own son represented Rothstein in a tax-evasion proceeding.94

  The FBN's New York office became a den of corruption. When rookie agent Jack Kelly joined the New York office in the early 1950s, he was warned to “try to find someone honest or at least honest when they are working with you.” FBN agent Tom Tripodi saw agents routinely take money in raids; they called it “‘making a bobo’ (a bonus).” Corrupt agents rationalized this by saying they were just taking “Mob money. Drug money.”95

  The FBN was a paragon of virtue compared to the narcotics units of the NYPD. “I won't say that every New York City police officer was dishonest, but finding one who wasn't was an exception,” said Kelly.96 In 1951, a Brooklyn grand jury found that “from top to bottom of the plainclothes division,” the police had formed “criminal combines” with narcotics peddlers. The Knapp Commission later singled out corruption in the narcotics units as the most serious problem facing the NYPD.97

  Corruption insulated traffickers on multiple levels. “The New York Police Department charged me two thousand dollars a month in order to operate between 110th Street and 125th Street,” said Arthur. “I couldn't get busted in there. I was on the pad.” The Cosa Nostra neutralized high-level investigations, too. If narcotics agents uncovered a mafioso during an investigation, the target would disappear, and the agents would be sent off on a wild goose chase by a senior officer on the take. When Frank Serpico joined the plainclothes division, he was told he could arrest blacks and Puerto Rican dealers, but “the Italians, of course, are different. They're on top, they run the show, and they're very reliable, and they can do whatever they want.” In 1969, nearly the entire seventy-six member elite Special Investigation Unit (SIU) of the NYPD was transferred out on corruption charges.98

  The low point was the mob's theft of the heroin seized in the French Connection case. The NYPD had stored the ninety-seven pounds of heroin they had seized in the case in the NYPD's Property Clerk's Office. Then eighty-one pounds of it, with a street value of $10 million, disappeared. The mastermind was Vincent “Vinnie Papa” Papa of the Lucchese Family. After the debacle, NYPD commissioner Patrick Murphy concluded that “the single most dangerous feature of organized crime syndicates was their ability to corrupt or co-opt local law enforcement.”99

  MAFIA EDICTS AGAINST DRUGS

  There is one grain of truth in the mythology. Some Mafia leaders did issue bans on drugs. According to Joe Valachi, in 1948, Frank Costello, boss of the Luciano Family “ordered its membership to stay out of dope.” The next edict was issued in 1957 when “all families were notified—no narcotics.” This ban was largely ignored, too.100 Wiretaps of the DeCavalcante Family in New Jersey record their amazement at all the drug dealing: “Half these guys are handling junk. Now there's a [Mafia] law out that they can't touch it.”101

  Still others tried issuing “no-drugs” orders in their families. Mob boss Paul Castellano barred narcotics under penalty of death, yet Castellano's own consigliere had a son who dealt. Lucchese Family caporegime Paul Vario outlawed dealing in his crew after his boss Carmine Tramunti was convicted on drug charges. It did not matter. Vario could not stop his own crew from dealing.102 The ineffectiveness of these bans shows that “the godfathers” were not omnipotent.

  There were human factors at work, too. Hypocrisy was part of the mobster life. Vito Genovese's veiled conversation with Joe Valachi shows how the bosses looked the other way. Bill Bonanno likewise suggests willful ignorance. He admits that “the Family's Administration…received envelopes of cash from time to time in exchange for keeping quiet. No one asked questions about where this money came from or how it was earned.”103

  Some mafiosi were in denial, too. In the 1930s, public opinion turned strongly against drug sellers as middle-class users devolved into street addicts. No one was lower than the “dope fiend” except the “junk dealer.” Even hardened mafiosi had trouble admitting they were into narcotics. Although Joe Valachi readily recounted murders he committed, he sheepishly downplayed his drug dealing, claiming he only sold “small amounts to get back on my feet.” In fact, the FBN had been tracking Valachi's drug trafficking since the 1940s, and it obtained multiple convictions of him. Meanwhile, Nicolo Gentile tried to blame his involvement with narcotics trafficking on woman problems and business debts.104

  It seems even wiseguys could feel shame. Just not enough to stop taking their cut.

  A
nything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge…anything at all.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

  Don't ask me why, but people seem to want to come to a mob place. Maybe it's the excitement of mingling with mobsters.

  —Vincent “Fat Vinnie” Teresa, My Life in the Mafia (1973)

  Thirty-year-old Frank Sinatra walked off stage after 2:00 a.m. to the whistles of adoring patrons under the papier-mâché palm trees of the Copacabana in midtown Manhattan. Sinatra had flown in from Hollywood, where he'd been filming It Happened in Brooklyn, to make a surprise appearance beside comedian Phil Silvers (who later played Sergeant Bilko on The Phil Silvers Show). In the audience were Broadway singer Ethel Merman, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sidney Kingsley, actress Paula Stone, and restaurateur Toots Shor. Gliding among them were the “Copa Girls,” the nineteen-year-old ingénues whose long legs and demure smiles became club trademarks under the talented management of Monte Prosser.1

  Presiding over the Copa behind the scenes was its hidden owner, Frank Costello. Mr. Costello was the bootlegger turned businessman, the street gangster who became a political fixer—and the secret acting boss of the Mafia's Luciano Family. Or as his nickname said, he was the “Prime Minister of the Underworld.”2

  Nighthawks who stepped out on the town for jazz on 54th Street, or drinks at a nightclub in the Village, or a prizefight at Madison Square Garden were at some point enjoying a mob-run production. Gangsters had an outsized influence over Manhattan's nightlife. They kept the doors open and the booze flowing. Mobsters, or glamorized versions of them, became part of the nightly allure. This chapter is a tour through the mob nightlife.