Lastly, a major conspiracy theory was ignited by Jewish gangster Joseph “Doc” Stacher when he told the authors of a 1979 biography of Meyer Lansky that Apalachin was a set-up of Vito Genovese. “Meyer and I were invited but he sent word that as it was November he did not want to make the journey north from Miami,” asserted Stacher. He suggests that Lansky tipped off the police to the meeting. “Nobody to this day knows that it was Meyer who arranged for Genovese's humiliation,” claimed Stacher.98
This story has all the makings of a tall tale. It rests entirely on Stacher, who was known as a “boastful” man prone to self-aggrandizement. Lansky never corroborated the story, and it has not come up in any wiretap. The story is implausible on its face, too. Apalachin was strictly a meeting of the Cosa Nostra with no Jewish or Irish gangsters, which was not unusual for high-level Mafia meetings. Moreover, it would have been wildly out of character for Lansky to alienate the entire Commission to satisfy a grudge. “When it came to the mechanics of group relations, Meyer also had the ability, rare at any age, to mediate and settle difference through intelligence and reason,” described a better biography of Lansky.99
THE AGENDA
Speculation has raged about the purposes of Apalachin. Statements by informants have leaked out that, when combined with other facts, reveal the agenda of the meeting.
At the top of the agenda was resolving the leadership successions following the assassinations of 1957. The Apalachin attendees were high-ranking mafiosi who had survived the assassinations of the early 1930s. They had little desire for another bloody conflict. Joe Valachi said the meeting was “to talk about…justifying the shooting Albert Anastasia.” Other informants have confirmed that dealing with the 1957 killings was the crucial issue.100
Casino gambling in Cuba was a pressing matter, too. Anastasia had been seeking to encroach on Santo Trafficante's casino interests in Havana. FBI informants reported that Apalachin included “consideration of an agreement about the Havana gambling situation and other gambling in Florida.” Trafficante went to stave off future encroachments. It was all for naught. In thirteen months, the Cuban revolution would reach Havana.101
For other attendees, Apalachin was another opportunity to discuss more traditional issues of territory and cooperation. Former Teamsters president Roy Williams testified of a conversation he had with Nick Civella after the mobster was caught at Apalachin. “Civella told me that, among other things, territory and cooperation was discussed,” Williams recounted. “Civella said he had Kansas City as his territory. He had working relations with other areas. He had friends in Chicago, he had friends in Cleveland, and he had friends in New Orleans.”102
Others claim narcotics was on the agenda. After fibbing about his presence, Joe Bonanno tried to spin its purpose: “Another item on the Apalachin agenda was supposed to be the narcotics issue,” said Bonanno. “If the 1957 meeting had gone according to plan there no doubt would have been a reaffirmation of our Tradition's opposition to narcotics.”103 Journalist Selwyn Raab asserts an “emergency item on the agenda was setting policy on coping with the stricter new federal law—the Boggs-Daniel Act—and dealing with the Sicilian heroin importers.”104 The author Gil Reavill goes further, writing that New York bosses (without Commission member Tommy Lucchese even present) did reach an agreement that morning in Apalachin. Supposedly, they agreed that “the American Mafia gets out of the wholesale heroin smuggling business” by spinning off importing and smuggling to “the Corsicans,” while “retail street distribution, that's another matter.”105
The notion that the Apalachin summit's focus was to be on drugs is dubious. The Mafia had been heavily involved in narcotics trafficking since the 1930s. Three attendees—John Ormento, Frank Cucchiara, and Joseph Civello—were already convicted narcotics offenders. Moreover, the Boggs-Daniel Act was enacted to fanfare in July 1956, three months before the October 1956 meeting of the Commission.106 It is difficult to understand why mafiosi would travel from all over the country, again, for an “emergency item” that had been in the news prior to the 1956 meeting. Meanwhile, Reavill's questionable account fails to appreciate long-term historical trends: as we saw earlier, the American Mafia had relied on Corsican drug smugglers since the 1930s, and it had been moving away from risky “retail street distribution” and toward wholesaling for decades.107
OMERTÀ HOLDS
In 1958, the State Commission of Investigation in New York and the McClellan Committee in Washington, DC, subpoenaed attendees to testify about the meeting. After pleading the Fifth Amendment, and much legal wrangling, some did testify.
It was a farce. New York boss Joseph Profaci claimed he just stopped by Barbara's while selling olive oil for his Fratelli Berio Distributing Company. Profaci told Barbara to “have faith in God.” Meanwhile, Joseph Magliocco testified that he was just chauffeuring Profaci and did not know they were going to Barbara's: “The first time I heard it, it was this time we take the road to get up into the hill by Barbara,” insisted Magliocco.108 In his testimony before the McClellan Committee in Washington, John Montana stuck to his story that he had just coincidentally stopped by Barbara's house for car repairs. “Mr. Montana, you did not realize until the following day that you had five other friends that were present at that meeting?” Robert Kennedy asked incredulously. “I did not,” Montana insisted.109 Meanwhile, Lucchese consigliere Vincent Rao said he went for free food. “There's nothing to discuss,” Rao shrugged. “I went and had a steak and it was an expensive steak.”110
In 1959, the Justice Department prosecuted the Apalachin attendees on an attenuated charge of conspiracy. Conceding that they lacked any evidence about the criminal aims of the meeting, federal prosecutors grasped for a theory: they alleged that during the forty minutes after Mrs. Barbara saw the state police (12:40 p.m. to 1:20 p.m.), the attendees entered into a conspiracy to commit perjury and obstruct justice, should they later be called to testify publicly. The jury convicted twenty of the attendees on this theory, but the Court of Appeals reversed all of their convictions.111
The mafiosi caught at Apalachin ultimately escaped the law by maintaining omertà. Although the wall of silence had been breached in the past, none of the Apalachin attendees turned state's evidence. Had even a single defendant turned state's evidence and testified about the meeting's criminal purposes, the convictions almost certainly would have been upheld. The leadership of the American Mafia would have been imprisoned in one fell swoop. But the attendees knew the state police had nothing on any of them, so none of them flipped. Omertà, the conspiracy of silence, ironically, had beaten a conspiracy case.
FALLOUT WITHIN THE MAFIA
Notwithstanding its legal victory, the Cosa Nostra suffered lasting consequences from Apalachin. On a personal level, Joe Barbara never recovered from the scrutiny. On June 15, 1959, he died of another heart attack at the age of fifty-three. His daughter attacked reporters covering his funeral: “You call us murderers, but you're the biggest murderers of us all,” she screamed.112
Apalachin publicly exposed and embarrassed the leadership of the Mafia. A wiretap picked up a conversation on Apalachin between Steve Magaddino and Sam Giancana:
Giancana: I hope you're satisfied. Sixty-three of our top guys made by the cops.
Magaddino: I gotta admit you were right, Sam. It never would've happened in your place.
Giancana: You're [f------] right it wouldn't. This is the safest territory in the world for a big meet…. We got three towns just outside of Chicago with the police chiefs in our pocket. We got this territory locked up tight. 113
Joe Bonanno saw it as an unmitigated disaster. “It was horrendous: all those men caught in the same place, a ton of publicity, a public-relations coup for law enforcement, a field day for journalists,” lamented Bonanno.114 Apalachin further undermined the authority of the bosses. “The soldiers felt that if the soldiers made that kind of a meet and everyone got arrested they all would die if they made a mistake like the bosses,” complained Vala
chi.115
For the mob, 1957 marked a divide: Before Apalachin and After Apalachin. As Lucchese Family associate Henry Hill explained, the year 1956 was “a glorious time” because it was “just before Apalachin, before the wiseguys began having all the trouble.”116 Their troubles started when a stubborn man changed his mind.
THE SEAT OF GOVERNMENT, WASHINGTON, DC, NOVEMBER 1957
Though some like to imagine that FBI Director Hoover had a miserable day that Friday, November 15, 1957, this is more schaudenfreude than fact. Neither the Washington Star nor the Washington Post carried the news from Apalachin, and Attorney General Rogers was tied up in a cabinet meeting. The director kept his appointment with a bureau photographer, took his regular call from Clyde Tolson, and spoke with an Illinois congressman, the governor of Arizona, and a federal judge.117 But this was the calm before the storm.
By Monday, November 18, 1957, it was apparent that Apalachin would be a reckoning. Over the weekend, the United States Attorney for New York distanced himself from Hoover by going on record stating that the Apalachin meeting was “further proof of the existence of a criminal syndicate organized across state lines.”118 That Monday morning, the first call into Hoover was from Attorney General Rogers. Meanwhile, the McClellan Committee was banging doors for intelligence on the attendees. “The FBI didn't know anything, really, about these people who were the major gangsters in the United States,” recounted Robert Kennedy. “I sent the same request to the Bureau of Narcotics, and they had something on every one of them.”119
DIRECTOR HOOVER BECOMES A BELIEVER
It took the colossal embarrassment of Apalachin to shake up Hoover. “Apalachin hit the FBI like a bomb,” recalled William Sullivan. Hoover went into a tirade, first blaming assistant FBI director Al Belmont, then the field agents in upstate New York. On November 27, 1957, twelve days after Apalachin, Hoover ordered all field offices to gather intelligence on the ten biggest “hoodlums” in their region under the Top Hoodlum Program.120
Hoover further assigned William Sullivan, head of the FBI's Research and Analysis Section, to write a comprehensive report on organized crime. Sullivan appointed one of his best men, Charles Peck, to lead the project. Since the FBI had so little intelligence on the Mafia, Peck's team relied on news articles, the Kefauver Committee hearings, and other enforcement agencies.121
Completed in July 1958, Peck's 280-page report contradicted Hoover's longstanding position. “There have been again insistent allegations of the existence of the Mafia in the United States. There have been also denials,” the report opened diplomatically. After setting forth all the evidence, the report stated forcefully: “The truth of the matter is, the available evidence makes it impossible to deny logically the existence of a criminal organization, known as the Mafia, which for generations has plagued the law-abiding citizens of Sicily, Italy, and the United States.”122
With trepidation, Sullivan submitted the report to the director. Hoover responded quickly with a handwritten note: “The point has been missed. It is not now necessary to read the two volume monograph to know that the Mafia does exist in the United States.” Sullivan felt relieved. “The battle had been won. Hoover finally gave in,” said Sullivan.123 Behind the scenes, the FBI's field agents went into action. “A furious Hoover declared war on the mob,” remembered William Roemer, a field agent who installed a wiretap dubbed “Little Al” in the headquarters of the Chicago Outfit.124
Robert Kennedy's appointment as United States attorney general ratcheted up the pressure on the FBI. “Through well placed informants we must infiltrate organized crime groups to the same degree that we have been able to penetrate the Communist Party and other subversive organizations,” Hoover instructed the FBI's field offices on March 1, 1961. FBI field agents developed high-level moles within the Mafia through the FBI's new Top Echelon Criminal Informant Program. Field agents planted dozens more electronic surveillance (ELSUR) bugs into the bars, social clubs, and backroom offices of mafiosi. Then, in 1963, the FBI flipped Genovese Family soldier Joe Valachi and persuaded him to testify publicly about the Mafia. Suddenly, the Cosa Nostra's innermost secrets were being revealed on national television.125
The lives of the wiseguys would never be the same again.
Nostalgia is…a rust of memory.
—Robert Nisbet (1982)
When they were struggling to survive in the 1910s, Joe Masseria, Charles Luciano, and Giuseppe Morello could scarcely have imagined that their lives would someday become a canvas for American popular culture. The Mafia has been the backdrop used to explore themes of family and immigration (The Godfather), America's coming of age (Boardwalk Empire), and suburban angst and mortality (The Sopranos). It is used to sell rap music (Yo Gotti), “reality television” (Mob Wives), video games (Mafia II), and even a mobster “lifestyle” magazine (Mob Candy).
This rests on a thick layer of nostalgia. Perhaps the greatest myth about the Mafia is that its members were a special band of brothers, that they were “Men of Honor” who forged a loyal fraternity of goodfellows. Mobsters like Joe and his son Bill Bonanno have peddled such stories for decades. When people learn you are writing a book on the Mafia, you often hear some variation of the following: “I happen to think that the Mafia did some good,” or “at least they had a code,” or “they were honorable when they first started out.”
This book is skeptical that there was ever a golden era of gangsters. The Mafia that emerges from the primary sources is an opportunistic crime syndicate that rose up within the historical context of New York City. The wiseguys broke every one of their “rules,” trafficked drugs almost from the beginning, became government informers, betrayed each other, lied, and cheated. In other words, they were not much different than the younger mafiosi who followed.
To be sure, the Mafia families were extraordinary crime syndicates. The Cosa Nostra was unquestionably the strongest criminal organization in New York. The Mafia families were in control of major union locals in Gotham and were linked to national unions like the Teamsters; they were the dominant narcotics wholesalers throughout the eastern half of the United States; they effectively managed professional boxing, reaped the Harlem numbers lottery, neutralized the local police, and were feared and respected by other criminals.
But the truth is that the Mafia was very much propelled by the forces of New York history. Simply put, the Italian-American gangsters had terrific luck. They were on the verge of extinction in the 1910s, only to see their fortunes reversed by the passage of Prohibition. They were then poised demographically to take over New York's unions just as the labor movement was surging in the 1930s. Gotham was an embarrassment of riches for sophisticated racketeers. They could extract payoffs from the huge waterfront, skim profits from bustling industries, cater to the Manhattan nightlife, and feed the appetites of thousands of heroin addicts.
It is time to put the Mafia back into the history of New York City. The mafiosi did not emerge out of thin air and take over by sheer force of will. This was very much New York's Mafia.
INTRODUCTION: THE GODFATHER VS. NEW YORK HISTORY
1. For the history of the Morellos, see Mike Dash, The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia (New York: Random House, 2009), pp. ix–x, 222–24, 305–306.
2. Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Gov. Operations: Organized Crime and the Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Senate, 88th Cong., 1st Sess., 270–73 (1963) (testimony of Joseph Valachi).
3. New York Times, March 20, 1971, July 22, 1975; Time, September 29, 1986; Joseph Bonanno with Sergio Lalli, A Man of Honor: The Autobiography of Joseph Bonanno (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).
4. New York University Law Professor James B. Jacobs first showed me that serious research could be done on the Mafia. In the summer of 1997, I worked as his research assistant while he worked on his book Gotham Unbound: How New York City Was Liberated from the Grip of Organized Crime (New York: New Y
ork University Press, 1999), which focused on initiatives in the 1980s and ’90s by the Justice Department and the Giuliani administration to purge the Mafia from six industries. We also coauthored an article on an anti-Mafia agency called the Trade Waste Commission. James B. Jacobs and Alex Hortis, “New York City as Organized Crime Fighter,” New York Law School Law Review, 42, nos. 3–4 (1998): 1069–92, reprinted in Organized Crime: Critical Concepts in Criminology, vol. 4, ed. Frederico Varese (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 179–200.
5. I am inspired by such authors as Mike Dash and Jerry Capeci, who combine exhaustive research with compelling narrative history. Mike Dash, First Family, pp. x–xi; Jerry Capeci and Tom Robbins, Mob Boss: The Life of Little Al D'Arco, the Man Who Brought Down the Mafia (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2013).
CHAPTER 1: A CITY BUILT FOR THE MOB
1. For example, Anthony M. DeStefano, King of the Godfathers: Joseph Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (New York: Pinnacle, 2007). Even Selwyn Raab's fine journalistic account Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2005) focuses on Mafia leaders from the 1960s onward.
2. Thomas E. Rush, The Port of New York (New York: Doubleday, 1920), pp. 11–12; New York State Crime Commission, Study of the Port of New York (Albany, NY: n.p., 1953), p. 17; James T. Fisher, On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 1.
3. Rush, Port of New York, p. 124; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 665–66, 741–44, 1116–25.
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