Although the police tried to get clear descriptions of the gunmen, some of the eyewitnesses may have been intimidated by this gangland shooting. The NYPD later conducted polygraph examinations of the barbershop employees. The polygraph examiner found “deception” in the answers of three barbers regarding whether they could positively identify the shooters. The examiner concluded that the barber who was shaving Squillante in chair number four had lied about being unable to identify the shooters because he was in “fear for self & family,” and did not “care who knows he is lying.”68 The police never found evidence that any of them were involved. They were simply too scared to talk.
9–6: Body of Albert Anastasia in hotel barbershop, October 25, 1957. (Photo by George Silk, used by permission of Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Meanwhile, Anastasia's caporegime Vincent Squillante was nowhere to be found. During the shooting, Squillante had run out of the barbershop with lather dripping off his face. He subsequently refused to cooperate with the NYPD's investigation. According to the NYPD report of his 1958 interrogation, Squillante flatly “refused to answer any questions on the grounds that he might incriminate himself.”69
The police nevertheless put together descriptions of the shooters from the barbershop employees willing to talk. At 4:44 p.m. that afternoon, the NYPD sent out a Teletype message: “HOMICIDE OF ALBERT ANASTASIA, OCT 25, 1957.” The lead gunman was described as a white male around forty years old, 5’8” and 180 pounds, with “sallow complexion.” He was dressed in a grey suit and fedora hat. The second gunman was described as a white male about thirty years old, 5’5” and 150 pounds, with “light complexion” and a “thin black pencil mustache.” He was dressed in a brown suit and hat, and had on dark green aviator glasses. Both suspects spoke American English with no foreign accent.70
THE MOBSTERS BEHIND THE PLOT
There is virtual unanimity in the underworld about who was behind the plot to kill Anastasia. “I believe that Vito Genovese worked hand in hand with [Carlo] Gambino and [Gambino deputy] Joe [Biondo],” said Joe Valachi in his 1963 testimony before Congress. Genovese went so far as to warn Valachi to “stay away from Albert's men.”71 Vincent “Fat Vinnie” Teresa stated that Vito Genovese was the “mastermind of the conspiracy,” and Carlo Gambino was the “inside man” in the plot.72 New York boss Joe Bonanno said that “the indications were that it was men within [Anastasia's] own Family.”73
Vito Genovese and Carlo Gambino had strong motives to kill Anastasia. As long as Anastasia was alive, Genovese had to worry that the volatile Albert would come after him. Eliminating Anastasia would also end any of Frank Costello's lingering notions about returning as boss. For the quietly ambitious Gambino, as the underboss of the Anastasia Family, he would be the logical successor to become the next boss once Albert was gone.74
For a long time, the NYPD focused on Santo Trafficante as a suspect in the plot.75 Trafficante was, after all, meeting with Anastasia in the days leading up to his murder. The Florida boss may have had second thoughts about letting Anastasia get a foothold in Havana. In November 1959, two years after the shooting, the NYPD was requesting that the Tampa Bay police put surveillance on Trafficante. But without the FBI's involvement, the NYPD was never able to question Trafficante in Florida or Cuba. So the investigation of him fizzled.76
THE SUSPECTED SHOOTERS
In contrast to the plotters, the identities of the shooters are still the subject of debate. This section lays out the evidence for the top suspects.
Profaci Family soldier Joseph “Crazy Joe” Gallo told people that he and his brother's crew were the shooters. In a 1963 article for the Saturday Evening Post, a gambler named Sidney Slater said that Joey Gallo had once boasted to him in a bar, “You can just call the five of us the barbershop quintet.”77 In his 1976 tell-all book, Peter “The Greek” Diapoulos, an associate of the Gallo crew, claimed that Vito Genovese and Joseph Profaci “gave that piece of work to our crew, designating Larry and Joey Gallo and Joe Jelly [Joseph Gioielli].”78
There are strong reasons to doubt that the Gallo brothers were the actual shooters. The Gallo crew was part of the Profaci Family. The Gallos had no connections to either Vito Genovese or Carlo Gambino. Moreover, the man they called “Crazy Joe” Gallo was known as an unreliable braggart. In his 1963 article, Sidney Slater acknowledged: “It's even possible Joey was boasting, having his kind of fun.”79 The Gallo brothers were not the type of men that the Profaci Family would lend out to another mob family to execute a high-level assassination. There are more compelling suspects.
In 2001, veteran mob journalist Jerry Capeci first reported that the Anastasia assassination was carried out by a crew selected by Gambino caporegime Joseph Biondo.80 According to Capeci's report, the crew leader was Stephen Armone. He reported that the “primary shooter” was Stephen “Stevie Coogan” Grammauta, a then-forty-year-old heroin trafficker, and that the “second shooter” was Arnold “Witty” Wittenberg, a then-fifty-three-year-old Jewish drug dealer. Capeci cited unidentified “knowledgeable sources on both sides of the law” as the basis for his report. Given Capeci's proven track record and deep sources in the mob and law enforcement, his report must be taken seriously.81
Documentary evidence has since been discovered that corroborates the story that Steve Grammauta was the lead gunman, and that he was acting under the direction of Joseph Biondo. The documents are stored separately in the FBI records in the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, and in the NYPD's files on the Anastasia case in the New York Municipal Archives. There is no indication that the FBI and the NYPD shared these documents at the time.
In an FBI report dated January 3, 1963, a confidential Mafia informant told the FBI that Joseph Biondo and Andrew Alberti helped organize the crew, and that the contract was given to “Steve Grammatula [sic]” whose “nickname is Steve Coogan.” The informant explained that since “Anastasia frequented the barbershop at the Park Sheraton Hotel,” the crew arranged so that “the guns were in the hotel room of Johnny Busso /PH/, a fighter.” (The informant did not assert that Busso knew of the assassination plot, and there is no evidence that Busso was in any way involved). The informant stated that “Grammatula [sic] went to the hotel, got the guns, shot Anastasia, and caught [the] subway and went home.”82 The informant's account is all the more credible because Grammauta was never publicly identified as a suspect, and Alberti's and Busso's presence that morning at the Park Sheraton Hotel was not reported by the newspapers. The informant was therefore not simply repeating what he had read in the papers.83
The NYPD's internal files on the Anastasia investigation confirm that Andrew Alberti and Johnny Busso had a room at the Park Sheraton hotel, and they were in the lobby that morning. According to the NYPD's report on its interrogation of Busso, the boxer recalled how “on the morning of October 25, 1957, he received a phone call in his room from Andrew Alberti,” who then “came up to his room.” They went down for breakfast in the hotel restaurant at “about 9 or 9:15 AM.” Busso said that he “spoke with numerous persons in the lobby of the hotel that morning in question, but does not remember Alberti introducing him to [Anastasia].”84 For his part, Andy Alberti admitted that he ran into Anastasia that morning in the Park Sheraton lobby, and that they had a conversation during which Anastasia “spoke…about Busso's coming fight at the Garden.” Although Alberti claimed he had no information on the murder, he also told the police that “he would not give any information, even if he possessed it, pertaining to this or any other crime.” The police knew they were dealing with a mobster: the report on Alberti notes that his associates “include Joseph and Stephen Armone.”85 In November 1964, Alberti would be killed by a shotgun blast in what the police believed was a gangland murder.86
Steve Grammauta's background and appearance made him a logical suspect as the lead gunman. Grammauta was a low-profile mafioso with close ties to the Armone brothers of the future Gambino Family. He would be convicted with Joseph Armone (the brother of Step
hen Armone) for running a heroin ring that they operated between 1956 and 1960. Furthermore, Grammauta fits the description of the first gunman, a “white male around forty-years-old” (Grammauta was forty in October 1957) with a “sallow complexion” (the man nicknamed “Stevie Coogan” had pale skin).87
Based on these sources, we can broadly outline the assassination plot. By the fall of 1957, the grievances against Albert Anastasia have reached a boiling point. Carlo Gambino's trusted lieutenant Joseph Biondo secretly assembles a team to eliminate the boss. Biondo selects his close associate Steve Armone to lead a crew of gunmen. They know that Anastasia gets his hair cut twice a month at the barbershop on the ground floor of the Park Sheraton hotel. So they stash revolvers in the room of one of Andy Alberti's fighters, who stay at the hotel before fights. They confirm that the boss is getting his regular trim on the morning of Friday, October 25, 1957. Steve Grammauta and the second gunman get the revolvers from the hotel room, put on their hats and aviator glasses, and head downstairs. At about 10:20 a.m., they slip across the threshold of the barbershop….88
THE AFTERMATH
“ANASTASIA SLAIN IN A HOTEL HERE,” read the New York Times.89 The murder of Albert Anastasia shook up the underworld. There had not been a public assassination of a New York Mafia boss since the murder of Salvatore Maranzano in September 1931. (Vince Mangano's killing in 1951 was carried out in secret).90
Carlo Gambino and his lieutenants moved swiftly to claim the mantle of leadership. As Joe Bonanno discovered, after Anastasia was killed, the plot's “second phase involved the quick recognition of Carlo Gambino as Anastasia's successor.”91 With the backing of Vito Genovese and Tommy Lucchese, Gambino became the boss of the new Gambino Family. Gambino named Joe Biondo as his underboss as reward for his ruthless service.92
The murder and replacement of Anastasia took place without major opposition. By October 1957, few wiseguys had any desire to avenge Anastasia.93 The ferocity of “The Executioner” shocked even other mobsters, who wondered when they might be his next victim. The murders of Vincent and Philip Mangano, the dumping of Peter Panto in a lime pit, the unpredictable outbursts of rage—it was too much even for his closest associates. “I ate from the same table as Albert and came from the same womb, but I know he killed many men and he deserved to die,” said his brother Anthony Anastasio to FBI agents in a confidential conversation.94
With all the upheaval in New York, the Commission called a national meeting in 1957. The main purposes of the meeting would be to affirm Vito Genovese's accession as boss of the new Genovese Family and to introduce “Gambino to the important men in our world.”95 Don Vito wanted to hold the meeting in Chicago. But Stefano Magaddino of Buffalo persuaded the Commission to hold it at his friend Joseph Barbara's fifty-eight-acre estate in upstate New York. Barbara's place was located outside the factory town of Endicott in a village called Apalachin.96
There's the state troopers.
—Mrs. Josephine Barbara (1957)
We didn't have any evidence of a national syndicate. Not until they held that hoodlum conference up in Apalachin, New York, back in ’57.
—FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (1971)
1944, ROUTE 17, OUTSIDE ENDICOTT, NEW YORK
The thief just wanted some company gas. With American soldiers fighting the Wehrmacht and Imperial Japan, the home front was rationing petroleum. But somehow Joseph Barbara Sr., a businessman who owned a bottling plant in Endicott, New York, always had extra gasoline. So an employee took a company truck with two containers of gas to Route 17 outside Endicott, where he stashed them in some bushes.1
Just then, state trooper Edgar D. Croswell was driving by on patrol. Born in Woodstock, New York, Croswell graduated from business college in the teeth of the Great Depression and took jobs with local police and as a detective in Sears, Roebuck's mail-order division. When he was twenty-eight years old, in August 1941, Croswell accepted an assignment with the New York State Police and spent the war patrolling southern New York out of Troop C's substation in Vestal, New York. It was a good fit. Six feet tall and angular, with piercing grey eyes, Croswell was something of a loner and a workaholic; he once said, “My hobby is police work.” A soft-spoken man who disliked guns, he believed in relentless investigations.2
Trooper Croswell was not a trifling man. So when the man coming out of the bushes gave only vague answers to his questions, Croswell searched the bushes and found the gas. Nearby was a truck registered to Mission Beverage Company. Back at the police substation, the thief confessed to stealing the gas. Croswell called the company's owner, a Mr. Joseph Barbara.
Trooper Croswell's first encounter with Joe Barbara was very strange. When Barbara arrived at the substation, Croswell noticed the businessman had a revolver on his belt. Barbara was brusque and dismissive, too. “As soon as I explained the situation to him he wanted no part of it. He didn't want the man arrested or anything done,” recalled Croswell. “Back in 1944 or 1945, 10 gallons of gasoline was pretty precious. It just aroused my suspicion who he was.”3
Croswell did some digging on Barbara. The Pennsylvania police had thick files on him. Barbara lived a gangster's version of the American dream. Barbara arrived at Ellis Island in 1921 when he was fifteen years old, and like many Sicilian immigrants, he found work in the Endicott-Johnson Shoe factories in the “Triple Cities” of Binghamton, Endicott, and Johnson City. Barbara, however, had no desire to end his days as a broken-down cobbler. In 1928, he joined up with Sicilian mafiosi in the lawless coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania, where he became a bootlegger, and was arrested as a prime suspect in three brutal murders, including one by strangulation. In 1933, Barbara returned to Endicott with his illegal earnings. He promptly started a bottling company, married a pretty local girl, and took on all the appearances of a legitimate businessman.4
With no charges to press, Croswell dropped the gas matter. But he would remember Barbara.
1949, TELEPHONE WIRETAP ON JOSEPH BARBARA'S HOUSE, APALACHIN, NEW YORK
Croswell's views on Joe Barbara hardened after their first encounter. In 1946, Barbara pled guilty to violating federal regulations in hoarding 300,000 pounds of sugar. This rationing offense meant something else to Croswell: Barbara, the former bootlegger, had 150 tons of sugar to produce moonshine liquor. There was also the company he kept. “Every investigation of any importance that we conducted in that area concerning vice or gambling seemed to center around Joseph Barbara and the people who associated with him,” Croswell recounted. The ostensible business executive surrounded himself with men like: Anthony “Guv” Guarnieri, who had served time for gun and gambling crimes; Patsy Turrigiano, a bootlegger and moonshiner; and Emanuel Zicari, a convicted counterfeiter. Behind the respectable façade, Barbara the businessman still had another foot in the underworld.5
Croswell began investigating Barbara with a doggedness bordering on obsession. Around 1949, he obtained a court order to wiretap Barbara's telephone. This was the first of several wiretaps that the New York State Police and the Broome County district attorney ran on Barbara's home intermittently between 1949 and 1956. Croswell would go the DA's office to read transcripts of Barbara's latest phone conversations. It was discovered that Barbara was calling major racketeers from around the country, such as Russell Bufalino of Pennsylvania. But the mafiosi kept their conversations short and nonincriminating: “That matter we talk about, we fix,” and “Okay, I meeta you at where we say.”6
Next, through undisclosed means, Croswell and a local reporter acquired Barbara's bank records. Large sums of money unconnected to any business transaction were being transferred one way into Barbara's account from men in Pennsylvania.7 Still, no proof of a crime.
So Croswell took a fateful measure: twice weekly, he began personally spying on Barbara's estate. “As a steady routine I took to driving by his house and jotting down the license numbers of the visiting cars and cross-checking their owners,” said Croswell. Barbara would turn on the floodlights and look blinkered-ey
ed out his window at the statie. Croswell admitted that such actions were part of “a little campaign of harassment we carried on against Barbara for years.”8
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18, 1956, ROUTE 17, OUTSIDE OF WINDSOR, NEW YORK
The Southern Tier region of New York was enjoying a glorious Indian summer the third week of October 1956, with temperatures reaching the seventies and fall colors at their peak, but the white Oldsmobile flashing by on Route 17 was not taking a leisurely drive.9
State Trooper Fred Leibe chased the speeding car for five miles before forcing it to the side of the highway outside Windsor, New York. The angry driver got out and walked to the back of the car. He was a short, paunchy man with beady eyes, who did not match the physical description on his driver's license. When Leibe asked the speeder the date of birth on “his” license, he got it wrong. Leibe arrested him. He told the three riders in the white Oldsmobile to follow his squad car back to the substation, but they ducked away on a highway exit.10
Croswell, now a sergeant, and Trooper Leibe unraveled the driver's identity. The speeder admitted to Leibe that his real name was Carmine “Lilo” Galante, and that the license belonged to Joseph DiPalermo, who the police found out was a narcotics trafficker. Most troubling, they discovered that Galante had served a long sentence in Sing Sing for shooting a policeman who surprised him during an armed robbery in New York City. Croswell found out that Galante had checked into a suite at the stately Arlington Hotel on Wednesday, October 17, 1956, along with the gangsters Joseph Bonanno, John Bonventre, Frank Garofalo, and Louis Volpe. What's more, they charged their bills to…Joe Barbara's bottling company.11
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