by Jim Marrs
In the various ethnic communities some people had belonged to the secret societies of other countries—the Mafia of Sicily, the Camorra of Italy, and the Tongs of China. They brought the learned terror and intimidation of these societies to their new home, where it found fertile soil.
As America entered the twentieth century, the city gangs were becoming more adept at their profession and expanding operations to include gambling, prostitution, and lotteries. They also were the bankers for the poor, charging exorbitant interest rates from those who could borrow money nowhere else.
The Irish brought a new dimension of power to the gangs. Unhampered by a language barrier and experienced in politics in their homeland, the Irish gangs gained advantages by allying themselves with political figures. Initially it was the politicians who used the gangsters. Ballot boxes were stuffed, voters intimidated, and opposition rallies broken up. But as the gang leaders grew more wealthy, and thus more powerful, soon the politicians came seeking favors. Through the years that Tammany Hall controlled New York City, Irish gangsters provided the enforcement muscle.
Bootleggers and Boozers
For more than fifty years prior to 1920, American groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League had lobbied Congress and state legislatures to prohibit the manufacture and sale of distilled spirits. Finally, with many male voters off serving in the military and with the emotional exhaustion and moral primness following World War I, their dream became reality. In December 1917, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the sale of intoxicating beverages, and by January 1919, the necessary thirty-six of the forty-eight states had ratified it.
In October 1919—overriding the veto of President Woodrow Wilson—Congress passed the Volstead Act, which created the government bureaucracy needed to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment. At midnight January 16, 1920, Prohibition became the law of the land.
Less than an hour after midnight, six masked men drove a truck into a Chicago railroad switchyard, broke into two freight cars, and made off with $100,000 worth of whiskey marked FOR MEDICINAL USE ONLY. Bootleggers bought a quart of quality Scotch at sea for $4, then diluted it into three quarts selling for as much as $40 a bottle.
That was just the beginning of an era that witnessed rapid decay of public morality, disrespect for law, and the rise of a gigantic criminal empire that remains with us today. In addition to the growing power of this criminal empire, Americans saw law-enforcement powers slowly shift from local officials to the national government. New power bases arose, such as the fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigation, begun in 1909, and a variety of Prohibition agencies, which were to evolve into such modern forms as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (forerunner of the Drug Enforcement Agency) and the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agency (now the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and Explosives).
Illegal booze was smuggled into the United States in every conceivable manner and from every conceivable point—across the Mexican and Canadian borders and offloaded from ships to small powerboats that moved out of remote bays almost at will.
One erstwhile honest businessman who turned to bootlegging may have been Joseph P. Kennedy, patriarch of the Kennedy clan. Although no conclusive evidence of Kennedy’s bootlegging is available—his business papers are still kept locked away in Boston’s John F. Kennedy Library—it has been widely rumored that the elder Kennedy got started on the road to riches by importing illegal booze. This allegation is supported by the fact that as soon as Prohibition ended, Kennedy immediately was in the Scotch, gin, and rum business through a firm he founded called Somerset Importers.
Unlike today’s War on Drugs, even Prohibition’s most ardent supporters were forced to concede that it simply didn’t work. If enough people want a commodity, others will find a way to get it to them—for a price.
The price of alcohol prohibition—the massive corruption of the political and legal system, the enormous power wielded by the criminal gangs, and the deaths and maiming from toxic hooch and gangland wars—was too steep. On December 5, 1933, Prohibition was repealed. After national Prohibition ended, each state created its own liquor authority, opening up new avenues for bribery and payoffs.
As America’s fortunes soared between 1910 and 1929, so did those of the gangs, particularly those with farsighted leadership. A Jewish gangster from New York, Arnold Rothstein, became an example of the successful underworld leader. Nicknamed “The Brain,” Rothstein grew from a small-time gambler into one of the most powerful men in the city. He reportedly even fixed the 1919 World Series. Though he initially refrained from bootlegging, Rothstein eventually became the largest supplier of illegal booze in the East. He began to move in respectable circles, rubbing elbows with city and state officials.
Rothstein was considered a wealthy front man for New York’s real Mafia leaders, which by the late 1920s involved two large families run by Giuseppe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. These families were locked in a protracted blood feud known as the Castellammorese War (from Maranzano’s Sicilian hometown of Castellammore del Golfo).
Eventually gangsters from both New York and Chicago were drawn into the war. By 1931, the war was going against Masseria when one of his lieutenants, Charles “Lucky” Luciano (real name: Salvatore Lucania), decided to arrange a “peace” by having Masseria murdered on April 15, 1931, in a Coney Island restaurant.
Luciano immediately called a meeting with Maranzano ending the war. Luciano was now the preeminent leader of the criminal mobs. Wisely, Luciano declined the title of capo di tutti capi (boss of all bosses). Instead he created a commission of bosses and organized the old Mafia families into a national crime syndicate, finally realizing the dream of merging the criminal gangs.
Luciano began to move control of crime away from the traditional Italian and Sicilian families. New faces were beginning to show up in the crime syndicate. The Jewish math wizard Meyer Lansky, Legs Diamond, Dutch Schultz, and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel were among those slowly being admitted to policy meetings. But Luciano was still the man in charge. After extensive investigation, Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver wrote, “The Mafia is the cement that binds organized crime and the man who perfected the cement was Luciano.”
Lucky Goes to War
Next to Prohibition, one of the most far-reaching events in the history of organized crime came during World War II when Lucky Luciano became partners with the US government.
Luciano never gave up his original means of making money—prostitution—and it proved his undoing.
In 1936, under special New York County prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, Luciano was tried and convicted of compulsory prostitution, ending up in Clinton State Prison at Dannemora in upstate New York. It appeared Luciano was safely put away. But then came World War II.
The war produced undreamed-of wealth for the mobs wherever they were. The friendly bootleggers of yesterday became the friendly black marketers of today, supplying nylons, new cars, gasoline coupons, tires, food ration stamps, and even military commissions and discharges.
It was unnecessary to counterfeit ration coupons. Gangsters simply obtained real ones from corrupt officials within the Office of Price Administration, a semi-volunteer organization that counted among its young lawyers an aspiring politician from California, Richard M. Nixon. One man who dealt with the Office of Price Administration and became rich in the automobile-tire business during the war was Charles G. “Bebe” Rebozo, who remained close friends with Nixon through the years.
Toward the end of 1942, the first year of war for the United States, things were not going well for the US Navy. In March of that year alone, twenty-four American ships had been sunk by German U-boats and on November 9, 1942, the former French liner Normandie caught fire and rolled over in its North River moorings in Manhattan while being refitted as a troop carrier. It was plainly an act of sabotage—and later was attributed to mobster Vito Genovese, who returned
to Italy during the war and supported dictator Benito Mussolini. Furthermore, naval intelligence was convinced that information about ship convoys was being transmitted to the Axis by longshoremen of German and Italian extraction.
In a desperate attempt to compensate for years of neglect in the intelligence field, US military officers decided to contact the mob for help. Navy Secretary Frank Knox created a special intelligence unit for the Third Naval District, including the Port of New York, which handled nearly half of all US foreign shipping. This unit was headed by Lieutenant Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden, who quickly opened an unobtrusive office in Manhattan’s Astor Hotel, where he met with mob figures.
The Navy appealed to Manhattan district attorney Thomas E. Dewey to put them in touch with Mafia leaders. A Dewey investigator, Murray Gurfein, contacted Mafia boss Joseph “Socks” Lanza as a first step. Lanza immediately went to gangster Meyer Lansky, who had helped guide Luciano in organizing the national crime syndicate. Lansky, sensing an opportunity to increase his prestige with the syndicate, met with Commander Haffenden and promised to get Luciano’s support. Years later, Lansky told biographers, “Sure, I’m the one who put Lucky and Naval Intelligence together. . . . The reason I cooperated was because of strong personal feelings. I wanted the Nazis beaten. . . . I was a Jew and I felt for those Jews in Europe who were suffering. They were my brothers.”
Although officially no deals were made with Lansky and Luciano—they supposedly cooperated out of sheer patriotism—soon Luciano was transferred from the “Siberia” of Dannemora to the more genial surroundings of Great Meadow Prison near Comstock, New York. The alliance proved effective.
Union strikes and sabotage were practically nonexistent on the New York docks during the war. And when US forces landed in Sicily, Mafia men were waiting to show them the location of German positions and safe routes through minefields.
During this final phase of the war, the Mafia-military cooperation—known as Operation Underworld—moved from the Navy to the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA.
On January 3, 1946, Dewey—by then governor of New York—forwarded to the state legislature an executive clemency for Luciano that noted his “aid” to the war effort. Luciano was freed from prison but promptly deported. He had never bothered to become an American citizen. He sailed for Italy aboard the SS Laura Keene on February 3, 1946. Once ensconced in Italy, Luciano didn’t accept retirement. He began to bring his formidable organizational abilities to worldwide crime. Later that year, he turned up in Havana, Cuba, where Lansky was busy consolidating the gambling and prostitution business. However, American authorities warned the Cubans that medical supplies would be shut off if Luciano was allowed to remain. He soon departed.
Returning to Italy, Luciano began to organize an international narcotics syndicate that remains in operation today.
Official awareness of organized crime dates back to a conference of law-enforcement officials called together by US attorney general J. Howard McGrath in 1950. Officials from New Orleans, Dallas, and other cities testified to the brutal takeover of crime in their areas. One dissenter was Otto Kerner, the US attorney from Chicago, who maintained there was “no organized gambling in the city of Chicago.” In 1973, Kerner was convicted of accepting $150,000 in bribes from horse-racing interests.
One of the results of the 1950 conference was the creation of a Select Senate Committee to probe organized crime under the sponsorship of senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. The Kefauver Committee hearings lasted well into 1951 and provided much more public knowledge about the national crime syndicate. While Kerner and McGrath—along with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover—had maintained that no crime syndicate existed, Kefauver and his committee provided the evidence that it did. The committee found that organized, professional gambling and book-making was widespread throughout the nation, that the narcotics industry was a “highly organized crime,” and that the mob had infiltrated legitimate businesses ranging from advertising to transportation.
It also showed the amount of official corruption the syndicate needed to flourish. The committee’s final report quoted a mobster named John Roselli, who later became embroiled in the CIA-Mafia assassination schemes, saying, “The wire service, the handbooks, the slot machines, and the other rackets which have thrived in the city of Chicago cannot operate without local corruption; if the handbooks are open, the conclusion is inescapable that the police are being paid off.”
The Kefauver Committee also found that organized crime had spread from New York and Chicago to new markets in places like Kansas City, New Orleans, and Dallas.
After visiting New Orleans, the committee described it as “one of America’s largest concentrations of gambling houses.” One of these houses, the Beverly Club, was found to be owned by Phil Kastel, Frank Costello, Jake Lansky (Meyer’s brother), and a local Mafia leader, Carlos Marcello.
Carlos Marcello
Carlos Marcello (real name: Calogero Minacore) was born in 1910, the child of Sicilian parents living in Tunisia. That same year the family came to New Orleans. At that time, the leader of the Mafia in New Orleans was Charles Montranga.
In 1922, Montranga was succeeded by one of his lieutenants, Sam Carolla. Carolla became a bootlegger during Prohibition and consolidated the mob’s control of New Orleans. In 1932, Carolla was convicted of shooting a federal agent and was sent to prison, where he continued to run his crime organization. That same year, New York mayor-elect Fiorello LaGuardia was clamping down on mob operations there, so Frank Costello moved his slot machine business to New Orleans with Carolla’s permission. Carolla even supplied a young associate to run the new gambling operation—Carlos Marcello.
By 1947, Carolla and Marcello—with the aid of Costello and Meyer Lansky—had expanded their gambling operations to include a racetrack, wire service, and several plush casinos. That year, Carolla was deported to Sicily and despite two illegal trips back, his control over New Orleans passed to Marcello.
By 1963, the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission estimated Marcello’s empire to range into the hundreds of millions of dollars, although Marcello claimed he made only about $1,600 a month as a tomato salesman. Much of Marcello’s earnings had been put under the names of close relatives, hiding his true worth.
Marcello’s national crime contacts included Costello, Joe Civello of Dallas, Sam Yaras of Chicago, Mickey Cohen of Los Angeles, and Santos Trafficante Sr., identified by the Kefauver Committee as Tampa’s leading mobster.
Since the Kefauver Committee hearings, the US government had tried unsuccessfully to deport Marcello, who held only a Guatemalan passport obtained allegedly by bribes.
In the spring of 1961, Marcello found he was facing a new, and much tougher, government opponent than in the past. Entering the offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Services in New Orleans for his quarterly appointment to report as an alien, Marcello found himself handcuffed and driven to Moisant International Airport on direct orders from the new US attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy.
He was flown 1,200 miles to Guatemala City, where he was dumped without luggage and with little cash. Forced to leave Guatemala because of the ensuing political uproar, Marcello somehow found his way back to Miami. House Select Committee on Assassinations chief counsel G. Robert Blakey claimed wiretaps showed Marcello was flown back to the United States by a Dominican Republic Air Force plane; however, others claim he was flown back by pilot David Ferrie.
Although still fighting deportation, Marcello managed to remain in the United States. But his Sicilian pride must have been greatly injured at Kennedy’s unceremonious actions. It was not long afterward that Marcello reportedly made threats against the attorney general.
Edward Becker, a Las Vegas promoter and corporate “investigator,” told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he was present at a meeting in September 1962, at Marcello’s estate just outside New Orleans, Churchill Farms. Becker said at the mention of Kennedy’s name, M
arcello became angry and stated, “Don’t worry about that little Bobby son-of-a-bitch. He’s going to be taken care of.” According to Becker, Marcello then uttered a Sicilian curse:
Livarsi na petra di la scarpa. (Take the stone out of my shoes.)
Marcello described President Kennedy as a dog and Bobby Kennedy as the tail. He then gave a startlingly accurate prophesy of what was to come. He said the dog will keep biting you if you only cut off its tail, but cut off the head and the dog will die, tail and all. The analogy was clear—with John Kennedy out of the way, his brother and attorney general Bobby Kennedy’s war on crime would come to an end.
Becker said Marcello even had a plan. Marcello said he would use a “nut” for the job, someone who could be manipulated so that the killing could not be traced back to Marcello.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations determined that there were many connections between Marcello and the JFK assassination—Marcello’s associate in Dallas, Joe Civello, was close with Jack Ruby; a Marcello employee, David Ferrie, was Oswald’s Civil Air Patrol leader and said to have been in contact with Oswald during the summer of 1963; and Oswald’s uncle, Charles “Dutz” Murret, was acquainted with Marcello through his personal driver as well as other associates.
It was just a few months after Marcello’s reported threat that Lee Harvey Oswald arrived in New Orleans.
In the early 1980s, Marcello was convicted in a sting known as Operation Brilab. While operating under cover, one of the FBI agents involved, Michael F. Wacks, had grown close to Marcello. Wacks said despite the distance in time, Marcello could not hide his hatred for the Kennedys. “Historians don’t understand the loyalty mob bosses felt politicians owed them,” Wacks told this author. “They thought they were on the same level. If they put someone into power and he didn’t do their bidding, their solution was to take him out.”
