As Valachi remembered events, it was Genovese who believed that Costello, despite his businessman veneer, was plotting to get rid of him. Whatever the reason, Genovese decided to strike first.
The evening of May 2, 1957, was one of those that fit the Costello lifestyle pattern. Traveling as he did without a bodyguard, Costello met with Phil Kennedy, a former semipro baseball player who started a modeling agency, at Chandler’s Restaurant on West Forty-ninth Street. News accounts said the group went to L’Aiglon on East Fifty-fifth Street to meet up with Loretta and Generoso Pope, the publisher and owner of the National Enquirer. Cindy Miller, a friend of Loretta’s who was seven months pregnant at the time, recalled she and her husband John also met up with the group in the French restaurant. (Miller was carrying her son, also named John, who became a popular TV journalist and later a top counterterrorism official with the NYPD.) Miller remembered that she and her husband then went with Kennedy and Costello down the block for coffee and a nightcap at Monsignore after which Costello said he had to go home to field a late-night telephone call from attorney Edward Bennett Williams. So at about 10:40 P.M. Costello and Kennedy hailed a cab and traveled north to 115 Central Park West. The others made their way home separately. Both men didn’t notice another black car in the vicinity that contained two men with nothing good on their minds.
Costello stepped out of the cab, bid Kennedy goodnight and proceeded to enter his building through the front door facing Central Park. Focused on getting upstairs, Costello didn’t at first notice a hulking man who rushed through the door. But the big man, who held in his right hand a .38-caliber revolver, got Costello’s attention by blurting out the now famous words “This one’s for you, Frank” the instant before he fired a single shot. The time was 10:55 P.M.
By flinching and turning at the right moment, Costello avoided the potentially lethal trajectory of the bullet, which punctured the front of his fedora and exited out the back. The single bullet skimmed the skin on Costello’s skull above the right ear and then struck the lobby wall. Miraculously, aside from a slight head wound, Costello was not seriously hurt. But Kennedy, alerted by the shot, ran back into the lobby and found Costello nursing his wound with a bloodstained handkerchief.
“Someone tried to get to me!” Costello cried out as he sat on a leather couch in the lobby.
“With his night on the town having come to an abrupt finish, Kennedy ran back outside to hail another cab,” said author Larry McShane in his book Chin: The Life and Crimes of Mafia Boss Vincent Gigante, in describing the shooting. “He led the bleeding Costello to the street, loading him into a cab and ordered the hack to hightail it toward Roosevelt Hospital on Tenth Avenue.”
The incident happened in a snap of time. The doorman told police that he had seen a limousine pull up behind the cab, which had just moments earlier let out Costello. A man rushed out and shot at Costello as he stepped into the lobby, the doorman remembered.
Cindy Miller recalled that she first learned of the shooting from a television news report and promptly called her husband John, a writer for the National Enquirer. John Miller rushed over to the Costello building and accompanied Loretta as she walked her two dogs in Central Park and then took Costello’s wife to the hospital. Police responded in force and took Loretta from the hospital to the local station house on West Fifty-fourth Street and later took Costello there for questioning. As more cops got involved Kennedy, Pope and others who were part of the dinner entourage that night were also pulled in for questioning. Cops also showed up at Cindy Miller’s apartment and told her to go with them back to the station house for questioning, mainly to retrace where Costello had been earlier in the evening. Kennedy told investigators he got a good look at the assailant while the doorman described him as being heavy-set, about six feet tall, and wearing a dark suit and black hat.
Costello told police he didn’t know who tried to kill him and that he was a man who had no enemies. The latter was untrue and Costello knew it. As described by McShane in his book, Genovese had farmed out the attempted hit to Anthony “Tony Bender” Strollo, a Genovese crime captain from Greenwich Village who conceived of a two-man team of driver Tommy Eboli and a washed-up boxer named Vincent Gigante. Costello may not have known the identities of the two men but he certainly knew who the big boss was who wanted him dead. The tipoff came from Anastasia, who had some time earlier met Costello in a restaurant and warned his friend about trying to smooth over a problem with Genovese. That veiled warning, attorney George Wolf said later, indicated to Costello that Genovese was his enemy.
It took a few weeks for detectives to arrest Gigante, who was said to have been upstate after the shooting. A Manhattan grand jury was convened, and Costello was of course called as one of the witnesses and he stuck to the story that he didn’t recognize the shooter. High-ranked cops thought Costello was lying but there was little they could do to shake his story. Police also started round-the-clock coverage of Costello as a safeguard against another attempt on his life. The cops even wanted to send a security detail to go with him when he went out to the house at Sands Point.
“He said it would ruin him out there. That’s tough,” NYPD chief of detectives James B. Leggett told reporters. “Maybe he’s going to Sands Point and if he didn’t have a bodyguard what would prevent him from going to a restaurant in Queens and get shot there.”
The grand jury looking into the shooting also went after something else related to Costello. The night he was wounded, cops found a list in Costello’s handwriting in his jacket that listed “gross casino wins” amounting to $651,284, as well as some unexplained initials. Later, officials noted that the notations matched to the penny the winnings of the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas, built by Costello’s old partner Dandy Phil Kastel. Investigators hauled Costello before the grand jury to ask him about the note and dollar amounts. But on the advice of Edward Bennett Williams, Costello invoked his right against self-incrimination and wouldn’t say a word. Even when the prosecution said it would offer immunity to Costello if he testified about the list, he still refused to talk. Judge Jacob Schurman ruled that Costello was in contempt of the grand jury and ordered him committed to “the workhouse,” which happened to be the Tombs, for thirty days. The Tombs was the infamous jail on Centre Street where all sorts of petty criminals and miscreants were held before trial or if they couldn’t make bail. It was not the kind of company Costello wanted to associate with. After fifteen days he was let go.
In his biography written with Martin Gorsch, Luciano recounted that after the bungled hit, Genovese knew he was the prime suspect within the inner sanctum of the crime family. Genovese and Costello then held a meeting at the New Jersey home of Longie Zwillman to iron out some kind of compromise, said Luciano.
“Frank sent me word about it later,” recalled Luciano. “Vito proposed a compromise because they had each other over a barrel after what happened. He told Frank, ‘Don’t do nothing.’ Don’t complain to nobody and most of all, don’t go to Charlie Lucky with this thing, because if you do, you’re gonna start a war. In that case, I promise that you’ll be the first guy dead.’”
Genovese would allow Costello to retire with his gambling and real estate interests, said Luciano.
Gigante was indicted for the attempted murder of Costello, and his trial in May 1958 was an exercise in frustration for the prosecution. The doorman at the Costello apartment building, Norval Keith, admittedly had poor eyesight but swore on the witness stand that Gigante was the man he saw in the lobby fire the shot at Costello and tell him “This is for you, Frank.” But on cross-examination by defense attorney Maurice Edelbaum, Keith said that the Gigante he saw the night of the shooting was much bigger and broader than the defendant in the courtroom. Police believed that Gigante had gone on a weight-loss campaign after the shooting—and also got a haircut—to hide his identity.
Costello took the stand on May 20 and gave his public version of the shooting for the first time. But, of course, the questioning bro
ught out his life story as it had unfolded years earlier in the Kefauver hearings. Costello readily acknowledged his days as a bookie. When it came time to describe the shooting, Costello said that at first he thought the sound of the gunshot was a firecracker and didn’t think much of it until he felt blood on the side of his face.
Costello also said that he didn’t catch a glimpse of anybody after he turned his head and added that he didn’t have a clue why anyone would want to shoot him. When Edelbaum got his chance to question Costello he had him look at Gigante and asked if he knew of any reason the defendant would want to take his life.
“No reason whatsoever,” Costello answered.
Edelbaum then asked if Costello knew who pulled the trigger that night and to tell the jury if he knew.
“Well. I’ll ask you, ‘Who shot me?’ I don’t know, I saw no one at all,” replied Costello.
“Thanks a lot, Frank,” Gigante was heard to say as Costello walked off the witness stand.
The prosecution had presented sixteen witnesses in the trial, and the defense called just one. In the end it was apparent that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had presented no evidence of a motive, and its single eye witness to the shooting, Norval Keith, wasn’t very persuasive. The jury got the case for deliberations late in the afternoon of May 27 and after a two-hour dinner break and more deliberations returned at 11:45 P.M. with a verdict of not guilty on the attempted murder of Costello.
Gigante’s mother Yolanda, who had been clutching her rosary, cried out “It was the beads ! It was the beads!” to explain the verdict. Gigante’s father Salvatore began crying. Gigante himself seemed relatively composed and told reporters “I knew it had to be this way because I was innocent.”
In the strange ways alliances work in the Mafia, Costello seemed to actually like Gigante, at least according to the mob boss’s lawyer. Wolf recalled that at some time after the trial Costello had a small gathering of people at his apartment.
“My wife and I went to dinner at Frank’s apartment and there, as one of the honored dinner guests, was Vincent Gigante,” recalled Wolf. “Frank was too intelligent to hold that against Vincent, who was, if anything, an errand boy sent to do a job.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“THIS MEANS I’M NEXT”
WITH ALL THE LEGAL WORK high-powered attorney Edward Bennett Williams was doing for Frank Costello since 1957, the fees the aging gangster was paying would have likely added up to a big down payment on a nice Washington, D.C., home for the busy lawyer. Williams was, if anything, inventive in his legal strategy, filing various appeals and motions in Costello’s court battles. Williams seemed to relish high-profile clients—he was also defending Teamster boss James Hoffa at the time—and he wasn’t averse to taking battles all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. By taking on Costello as a client, Williams set in motion a dizzying series of legal moves that went on for well over a year as he fought to keep his notorious client out of prison. Sometimes a scorecard was needed to sort out what was going on with Costello’s cases.
Back in March 1957 Williams’s argument that Costello might have been sentenced incorrectly in the income tax evasion case had led to the Supreme Court granting him bail. But in June, the high court issued a ruling that went against Costello’s position. However, rather than go straight back to prison, Costello was able to remain free until at least late September after Williams asked for a postponement so that he could argue with the federal judge who heard the tax trial that the verdict should be overturned.
What Williams had in mind was another series of ingenious arguments to challenge the tax evasion conviction. He raised three points: that the government illegally used wiretap evidence, that federal agents began watching Costello’s mail, and that prosecutors screened potential jurors by secretly looking at their tax returns. These weren’t insignificant issues and in October, Judge John F. X. McGohey ordered a hearing in which the prosecutors in Costello’s tax prosecution were called to testify.
The former chief prosecutor, Floyd F. MacMahon who later went on to become a federal judge, admitted that the jurors were screened to find out if any had tax problems themselves and might react favorably toward Costello. Today, this potential bias would be examined when jurors are questioned before they were selected. But the secret vetting of their returns showed the length the government was willing to go to weed out anything that might give Costello an edge—including in essence carrying out tax audits of potential jurors. Another government official with the IRS told of being ordered to examine the returns and reporting back what the New York Times said were “irregularities and unusual deductions.”
Two other prosecutors in the case, Powell Pierpoint and Whitney North Seymour Jr., who later became the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, testified with what were called “vague” recollections about the way potential jurors were categorized in special lists. The lists were numbered from one through four, with the lowest number reflecting jurors who were probably most favorable to the government and the highest reflecting least favorable. Even the American Civil Liberties Union felt the practice was noxious and according to the Times “condemned” it. Williams himself stated that the practice was “a malignant growth” on the jury system, which could make people regard service as an “evil to be abhorred.”
Judge McGohey had a lot to think about, and on October 22 said he was reserving his decision. But three days later Costello’s world was shaken not by anything that happened in court but what transpired in the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan. It was while he was sitting in the barber’s chair, getting a haircut that Albert Anastasia, the feared Brooklyn gangster who was a close ally of Costello, was gunned down by two men. The armed pair, described by witnesses as being broad and wearing scarves over their faces, blasted away at Anastasia, striking him with five rounds, including one to the back of his head. The man from dockland known as the “Mad Hatter,” fell dead to the floor as a pool of blood collected around him.
Cops found two handguns believed to have been used in the killing near the barbershop, one in a hotel corridor and the other in a trash bin at the end of a nearby subway platform. Detectives pulled in mobsters like Costello and Lansky to find out what they knew—which for the police was nothing. But privately, Costello was not only shaken with the loss of his friend, but he knew very well that he might be next. Wolf’s description of the aftermath of the shooting was revealing.
“After Anastasia’s murder, I was summoned within hours of the shooting,” recalled Wolf. “When I arrived at Frank’s apartment, I found him and Anastasia’s brother Tony clutching each other and sobbing.”
This was the first time Wolf saw Costello cry, and the attorney believed his client felt vulnerable in a crime war that was imminent. There would be no peaceful way of dealing with things since Costello’s staunch allies had been removed by death or legal issues. Luciano was back in Italy and unable to control things. Moretti was killed in 1952. Adonis was deported back to Italy. Now, Anastasia was dead. It was just Costello now alone to face Genovese.
“There was no hope,” said Wolf. “As I stood at the door of his living room, Frank looked up, saw me, and said quietly, ‘This means I’m next.’”
Actually, it turned out to be Genovese who was next, although not because he lost his life. About three weeks after the hit on Anastasia, on November 14, 1957, Genovese and scores of other Mafiosi and their associates traveled to the home of Joseph Barbara Sr., in Apalachin, New York. Their presence in such large numbers caught the attention of two New York State Police troopers, Sgt. Edgar D. Creswell and trooper Vincent Vasisko. To make a long story short, while police suspected the conclave was for criminal purposes and pointed to airline and hotel reservations made under false names as evidence of secrecy, nothing was proved against those who were rounded up, and they were all let go. (Federal conspiracy charges were brought against some of the participants, but an appeals court overturned
their convictions.)
Wolf later said that Costello didn’t attend the Barbara event—and avoided the embarrassment and possible legal problems—because he had agreed that Genovese was to be crowned the new boss of all Mafia bosses at the meeting. But because of the bust, Costello now felt he was a marked man again.
On the legal front, Williams continued to pull rabbits out of the hat for Costello. One result was that the festering attempt by the government to denaturalize Costello was dealt a serious blow. Immigration officials claimed that Costello had lied or concealed facts on his application for citizenship back in 1925, mainly by not disclosing the way he violated the laws against Prohibition and fibbed when he said he was in real estate. The case actually went to trial when allegations were raised that police had tapped Costello’s telephone during the 1926 bootlegging prosecution. Government attorneys admitted hearing the same thing but said the immigration case didn’t stem from wiretap evidence.
A troubled Judge Edward Palmieri halted the trial and after reviewing some transcripts found that there had been extensive use of wiretaps beginning in the 1920s. Since Palmieri said he couldn’t figure out what evidence was admissible and what was not, he granted Costello’s request to dismiss the case but allowed the government time to come back to court again if there was untainted evidence.
However, Costello again went on the legal merry-go-round. An appeals court overturned Palmieri and said the judge should have given the government attorneys some time to come up with untainted evidence. The court also said the fruits of any wiretaps from 1925 to 1926 were admissible in federal court. But then the U.S. Supreme Court, which by now must have had open reservations for Costello on its dockets since Williams was so prolific in filing petitions, took up the case and reversed the appeals court, ruling that the government should have filed what was known as an “affidavit of good cause” when it sued Costello. The case was again dismissed.
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