Chastened, government attorneys brought a similar case in May 1958 under a different section of the immigration laws and remembered this time to file the right affidavit. The trial on the denaturalization case got started in December 1958 before Judge Archie Dawson and went into January 1959. Essentially, the government claimed Costello lied profusely on his citizenship application: claiming his occupation was real estate when in fact he was a bootlegger, that his sponsor Harry C. Sausser was of good character when he was also a bootlegger, that the only other name he ever used was Francisco Castiglia, and failing to disclose to the immigration examiner that he had been arrested four times and convicted once.
To show Costello’s bootlegging past the government put his old buddy Emanuel Kessler as a witness who related how Costello trucked smuggled booze for him and told the story of the Blackwell Mansion operation in Astoria. Costello’s old comments about “being in the bootlegging business” also came back to haunt him as the government brought them up again. Harry Sausser, one of the two witnesses who signed Costello’s citizenship application, had died in 1926, but his daughter Helen testified about her father’s bootlegging activities with Costello.
The court acknowledged that Costello did some real estate business in 1925 through his Koslo Realty Corp. but found the amount to be insubstantial. Costello presented no witnesses to rebut the government’s case. The results were predictable. Judge Dawson found that for some years prior to May 1, 1925, when Costello filed his naturalization request, he had been actively engaging in bootlegging in violation of U.S. law and that his real occupation was that of a bootlegger and not in real estate. The bootlegging showed that contrary to his oath, Costello was violating the U.S. laws at will and was behaving in a way contrary to his being a “man of good moral character, attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States.”
Relying on the bootlegging evidence, Dawson didn’t have to mention the other allegations about Costello concealing his criminal record and the use of other names like Frank Saverio. Costello, said Dawson, had concealed facts about himself that, had they been known in 1925, would have denied him citizenship. So, on February 20, 1959, the court granted the government’s request and cancelled Costello’s citizenship.
Costello wasn’t in New York when Dawson yanked his citizenship because back in October, even before the immigration trial started, the old gangster decided to return to prison to serve the rest of his sentence for income tax evasion. He had no more appeals left. On October 21, what the newspapers described as a sullen Costello, suffering from a cold, surrendered in Manhattan federal court to serve what was expected to be two years and eight months in prison, taking into consideration time off for good behavior. Dressed for the occasion in a blue topcoat and blue suit and accompanied by lawyer Morris Shilensky, Costello surrendered, waving his right hand as he walked to the detention cells.
It wasn’t long after Costello arrived at Atlanta federal penitentiary that he found himself in the company of old nemesis Vito Genovese. The leader of Luciano’s crime clan had been indicted in July 1958 for being part of a heroin conspiracy along with Gigante, the underling who shot Costello a year earlier. A number of crime experts have long maintained that the case against Genovese was a frame up, that the main witness against him was lying about having dealt with the crime boss on the heroin deals. But Genovese was convicted and in April 1959 was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and shipped off to Atlanta, although he still remained boss of the crime family that would bear his name.
Having Costello and Genovese in the same prison could have been a volatile mix, and tension in Atlanta was high. It seemed that prisoners believed Genovese had caused Costello’s tax problems and that he was ready to cause the crime boss problems. It was then that George Wolf was called to Atlanta by Costello, Wolf recalled, to help calm the situation—and in effect save Genovese’s life.
Wolf gave no date for his visit to the penitentiary, but in his book, he said that the warden, whom he didn’t identify, told of the looming danger. The warden said that so many inmates believed Genovese had caused Costello his tax problem and that a war was about to break out and there simply weren’t enough guards to protect Genovese, remembered Wolf.
The attorney then visited Costello in a special room set aside by the warden. Costello said that indeed the situation inside the prison was dangerous and that no matter what he said to the other inmates, they didn’t believe that Genovese had done nothing to cause his problem, said Wolf.
“This thing is too dangerous,” Costello said, according to Wolf. “Everybody’s in a panic. I pass the word myself that Vito’s all right, and it don’t do no good. I want us to have a meeting in the warden’s office with a photographer shaking hands.”
Wolf said the warden then brought him to Genovese and the two men met alone in a room. It was then that the attorney explained to Genovese what Costello had in mind and the crime boss accepted the idea of a meeting.
“George, between you and me, Frank is something,” Wolf recalled Genovese telling him. “He is so smart I am always wondering what’s behind everything he says and then I find he is talking straight and I’m the jackass. He even warned me about holding that meeting in Apalachin and I didn’t listen.”
Wolf didn’t stay around for the meeting but years later saw the wisdom behind Costello’s prison diplomacy. Costello not only defused the situation and possibly saved the life of Genovese but got himself protection when he got out of prison and returned to New York.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“HE’S GONE”
FRANK COSTELLO FINALLY GOT out OF ATLANTA on June 21, 1961, for the tax case but was immediately picked up by the NYPD on some old business going back to when Vincent Gigante shot him. Back in 1957, Costello had refused to talk in the grand jury about the notes found in his pocket after he was wounded, which referred to over $650,000 in gambling winnings at the Tropicana Hotel. His clamming-up got him a fifteen-day sentence in the “work house.” Clad in a suit and looking about fifteen pounds thinner, Costello was taken to Rikers Island to serve the time. It had to be a demeaning experience, as the other prisoners were common thieves and other miscreants.
The short stint on Rikers Island was really small stuff compared to the other big worry Costello had on his mind. Back in February 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court by a vote of 6 to 2 had ruled against Costello on his attempt to overturn the revocation of his citizenship. The high court agreed, in the face of all the evidence from Costello’s bootlegging days, that he hadn’t been truthful on his citizenship application. The justices also didn’t think that he could truthfully claim that real estate was his occupation.
Costello was out of options in his effort to keep his citizenship. He also faced deportation, and the legal battle wasn’t going well on that front after the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) said he should be booted out of the country. At least until he exhausted all his court challenges to the BIA, Costello was able to stay free on bond.
FBI surveillance reports showed that in this period after Costello got out of prison that he was “very circumspect” regarding his activities. Costello and his wife spent their days going back and forth from Manhattan to Sands Point. Cindy Miller remembers Costello liking to take walks in Central Park to watch the animals being fed in the zoo. Agents heard conflicting information about whether Costello was still active in the mob. Mob turncoat Joseph Valachi told the FBI that Costello had been “reinstated” back into Genovese’s family, but agents were skeptical. Their own surveillance had not developed any significant information about Costello.
What the agents and cops did notice was that Costello continued his old pattern of taking cabs when he left his apartment late in the morning, dining in good restaurants and returning home at what was said to be sensible hours. Costello clearly wanted to keep himself above suspicion while his appeal was pending with the Supreme Court on the deportation case. While the FBI once considered Costello—because of his 1915 c
onviction for carrying a handgun and his association with other top hoodlums—to be dangerous, by 1963 the agency had a change of heart and considered him not a threat.
In August 1963 when Nassau County District Attorney Bill Cahn subpoenaed about twenty mobsters after Valachi had testified to Congress, Costello was on his way to his home in Sands Point when he decided to stop by the courthouse where the prosecutor had an office. As described in Newsday, Costello was wearing a blue suit, his hair immaculately combed, and he was smoking a cigarette when he looked at Cahn straight in the eyes.
“I was on my way to Sands Point for the weekend and I thought I’d stop by . . . I never ducked a subpoena in my life and I didn’t want you to think I was ducking you,” Costello, speaking in his familiar raspy voice, told Cahn.
Costello said he really couldn’t answer any questions about Valachi’s testimony but when asked what he was doing with himself, answered, “I’m retired” and then left the building to get in a taxi for the trip home.
* * *
As the year 1964 came around, Costello’s world had changed greatly. Putting aside the threat of immigration, his old friends had disappeared, often violently. Anastasia and Moretti had been killed, as had Anthony Carfano, an old Luciano captain who had run afoul of Genovese and was murdered one night in 1959 as he sat in a car with Janice Drake near Idlewild (now La Guardia) Airport. Adonis had been deported. Luciano, the one mob boss who could have acted as a counterweight against Genovese, had died suddenly of a heart attack in January 1962 at the airport in Naples, Italy. Not long after Luciano died, Costello’s old gambling partner Philip Kastel committed suicide in New Orleans. Costello had his investments and sources of legitimate income, but the old heady days of being a mobster were gone. If the government finally had an order to deport him, Costello might have to think about going back to his ancestral town of Lauropoli, where his old friend “Professor” Frank Rizzo still lived.
But, in a sudden twist of fate, on February 17, 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court, which over the years had blown hot and cold with Costello, gave him a final gift. In a 6 to 2 decision, the court set aside the deportation order. The decision by Justice Potter Stewart turned on the meaning of a phrase in the immigration law. The wording in question stated that an alien could be deported who “at any time after entry into the United States is convicted of two crimes involving moral turpitude.” Costello’s conviction for two income tax crimes clearly fit that definition of “moral turpitude.”
However, there was a catch. Stewart wrote that those crimes didn’t help the government because they had occurred in 1954, at a time when Costello was still a citizen as he had been since 1925 and not an alien. The court said there wasn’t anything in the law that showed that Congress meant to count convictions during the period a person was a naturalized citizen, as opposed to when naturalization was later lost, as it was in Costello’s case in 1961. The denaturalization case was started in 1952, nearly ten years before Costello was stripped of his citizenship.
“It is the biggest victory in my life,” said an effusive Costello. He might not be an American citizen, but he didn’t have to leave the U.S.
For as long as he was alive, Costello could count on being under government scrutiny. For a start, the IRS and prosecutors kept surreptitiously through the 1960s pulling Costello and his wife Loretta’s tax returns. The documents showed that since he was a free man Costello’s main source of income was gambling, averaging about $20,000 over a three-year period from 1961 to 1963, when he reported $29,000. He had some royalties from oil leases in Oklahoma and Texas. The FBI records show that the agency was pumping Valachi for information about Costello although there was nothing that led investigators to think Costello was involved in crime family activity.
Costello was paying his taxes and had enough money to keep the apartment in Manhattan and the house in Sands Point. But there was one indication that he was feeling the need to get a bit of financial help. For that, he is said to have turned to his old friend Generoso “Gene” Pope Jr., publisher of the National Enquirer. According to Pope’s son Paul in his book The Deeds of My Father, after Costello got out of prison in 1961, he visited Pope at his office in Manhattan. Both men had a long history together and it was Costello who, Paul reported, gave his father the loan to purchase the newspaper, money that had been repaid long ago.
During the meeting, Costello and Pope shared a drink and talked about old times. It was then, according to Paul, that Costello told the elder Pope that he felt he had something to do with his success.
“You did,” Gene Pope answered, according to his son’s account.
Costello then went on to ask Gene Pope if he would make him a partner, to give him a “little taste of the pie,” as Paul recounted in his book. As much as Gene Pope knew that he owed Costello for his help, he couldn’t, not in the world he was living in, make Costello a partner and told him so.
“Costello didn’t have the heart to keep fighting,” Paul wrote. “He was old and tired and felt embarrassed, a man who’d held lives in his hands, now begging for something that should’ve rightfully been his.”
It is unclear if Costello ever saw Pope again after that meeting. But the so-called “Prime Minister of The Underworld” was in his dotage, an old gangster trying to keep whatever vestige of the old glory days alive, seeing a few old friends and keeping dinner dates.
Throughout the 1960s, despite regular FBI and police surveillance, law enforcement found little of substance to report about Costello. He was spotted one day in November 1964 meeting with Joseph “Socks” Lanza, the old mob boss of the waterfront, at the Waldorf-Astoria. Both men were then seen walking to Les Champs Restaurant on Thirtieth Street where the agents said “they dined leisurely,” two old gangsters likely talking about the old times. After lunch, Costello went over to the Biltmore Hotel, undoubtedly to get a massage.
One indication that Costello might have had some clout and access to money was related by actor Anthony Quinn, in his co-authored autobiography One Man Tango. Quinn recalled how a production he was involved in around 1971 for the film Across 110th Street, a police-Mafia melodrama, was running into some money troubles. Quinn had what he said was an “unconventional” friendship with Costello and commiserated with him over breakfast in Rumpelmayer’s café in the St. Moritz on Central Park South over the fact that a lot of money was needed to finish the production.
“How much?” Costello asked, according to Quinn.
“About a million,” replied Quinn.
“Oh, that is nothing,” answered Costello.
When Quinn got angry, saying that $1 million was a lot of money and that he needed it to complete the project, Costello told him to calm down and that he would give him the funding. Quinn said that he told Costello he couldn’t take a check—or cash—from him and comingle it with studio funds because it would raise too many questions. Costello insisted he would make the deal for the cash on a handshake but in the end Quinn knew he couldn’t take money from him and got the funding somewhere else.
FBI Agents heard that Costello might be acting as an arbiter of disputes and did try to interview Costello. In one encounter in March 1966, Costello was pleasant but on the advice of his lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, he wouldn’t say anything. “After an exchange of pleasantries, the interview was concluded,” according to an FBI summary.
In July 1972, agents had a little better luck with Costello, who said he had just returned from a weekend in Sands Point. Usually, said Costello, he spent Tuesday to Friday at his apartment in Manhattan and then went back out to Long Island on Friday, returning to Manhattan on Tuesday. The agents had approached Costello because four days earlier, July 16, Thomas Eboli, one of three powerful crime-family captains who were running the Borgata after Genovese had died in prison in 1969, was shot dead after he visited his girlfriend in Brooklyn. Eboli, known as “Tommy Ryan,” was a manager of boxers and at one time had squired Gigante during his brief fighting career.
Cos
tello told the agents he didn’t know Eboli in the years before he went to prison. When Costello came out of Atlanta, he said Eboli had risen in status and as he put it “grew like a mushroom.” While he had met Eboli a few times, Costello said he had not seen him in person for six years. In fact, continued Costello, he had been away from people with bad reputations for years. But, when reminded by agents, Costello had to admit that he had been seen a year earlier in the presence of crime boss Carlo Gambino when he bumped into him at the Waldorf and then invited him for lunch.
These uninformative conversations, along with the uneventful life Costello appeared to be leading, finally made the FBI lose interest in him. He was considered a man of advanced age, not involved in apparent criminal activity. In October 1972, the agency placed his file in “closed status,” with the option to reopen it if the situation changed. He was also now no longer considered dangerous.
* * *
Costello may have been of little help to the FBI in his conversations with them later in his life. But given the right opportunity, Costello was thinking about finally spilling the beans. At the age of eighty-two, Costello still had a sharp mind and had survived while many of his old associates had died or were consigned to prison. There was much for Costello to tell. Of course, doing so would have violated the fabled Mafia oath of omertà, the oath of secrecy designed to keep the organization in the shadows and away from scrutiny by outsiders. Although in later years omertà would be shredded by the action of many turncoats, the oath of secrecy all Mafiosi abided by was still in force—Joseph Valachi excepted.
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