by Tim Newark
Italian organized crime was not wild about Mussolini, either, as many of its mafiosi had fled from Sicily in the wake of the Fascist crackdown on the island. Salvatore Maranzano and Joseph Bonanno were just two of these criminal refugees. It meant that the Mafia in New York were more than happy to support anyone speaking out against Mussolini.
Carlo Tresca was a Socialist activist who settled in Greenwich Village and opened up an anti-Fascist newspaper called Il Martello—“The Hammer.” When a Blackshirt-supporting hoodlum was assigned to kill him, the Mafia intervened. They called Tresca to a meeting where the trembling would-be assassin was pushed down on his knees before him. The mobsters told the killer to kiss the hand of Tresca and forget about the contract on him. It was an early display of organized crime intervening against extremist politics.
The violence at demonstrations grew in intensity and culminated in a murderous meeting on Memorial Day in May 1927. Near the stairs of an elevated station in the Bronx, a group of Blackshirts was gathering when one of their members, thirty-nine-year-old Joseph Carisi, was attacked by a red tie–wearing stranger.
“Carisi had heard the pattering of footsteps,” said the newspaper report, “and turned just as the long knife blade came into sight. He shouted for help, and as he looked upward to where his companions were approaching the top of the flight of stairs the stranger stabbed him six times. The blows were delivered with lightning speed and were all within a space of inches and around the collarbone.”
Carisi died shortly afterward, along with a second Blackshirt victim on that day. Street battles with anti-Fascists followed, including one involving two hundred Blackshirts in central Manhattan. “Across the broad plaza they ran,” noted a journalist, “toward the Hotel Astor, while astonished pedestrians fled for cover before the onrush of whip-waving, yelling Italians. Traffic officers blew their whistles. Motorists clamped brakes.”
Such political violence was getting out of control, and the New York police banned all Fascist parades. Mussolini was at first outraged by this murderous assault on his followers, but realizing it was becoming more of an embarrassment than a help to his foreign policy, he withdrew his support for the Fascist League of North America, and it was dissolved just before Christmas 1929. It didn’t mean the trouble went away—many Italian immigrants continued to publicly demonstrate their support for Mussolini—but it meant they no longer had an official organization on their side of the Atlantic.
In contrast, American Nazis were only just starting to get into their stride in the early 1930s, and this provoked Jewish gangsters into hitting back.
“My friends and I saw some good action against the Brown Shirts around New York,” recalled Meyer Lansky. “I got my buddies like Bugsy Siegel—before he went to California—and some other young guys. We taught them how to use their fists and handle themselves in fights, and we didn’t behave like gents.”
Lansky’s family had fled from anti-Jewish pogroms in Belarus, and he was not going to accept such intimidation in his new homeland. German support for Hitler had been growing in the United States ever since he became chancellor in 1933. Meetings of the German American Bund took place across the United States, where young men and women paraded in martial uniforms with swastika badges.
“There was a house on St. Nicholas Avenue that people spoke of in whispers,” remembered one resident of a German neighborhood in Ridgewood, New Jersey. “The shades were always pulled down. On a few occasions the shades went up and on the far wall was a well-lit picture of Adolf Hitler.”
Numbers of Nazi supporters grew from the low thousands to more than a hundred thousand within a few years. They organized rallies and noisily demonstrated their admiration of Hitler and the German Nazi party. In 1936, Fritz Kuhn took over leadership of the Bund and campaigned on behalf of a Republican candidate for president. They received the active support of leading Americans such as the car manufacturer Henry Ford.
In reaction to this, the Jewish establishment in New York organized its own violent response. New York State judge Nathan Perlman contacted Lansky for help in 1935, offering him financial and legal assistance if he would take the fight to the Bund. Lansky was happy to wade in and described their efforts to disrupt a Nazi meeting in Yorkville, center of the German community in Manhattan.
“The stage was decorated with a swastika and pictures of Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only about fifteen of us, but we went into action. We attacked them in the hall and threw some of them out the windows. There were fistfights all over the place. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out … We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults.”
Perlman and other leading Jews were pleased to see this. Italian mobster friends of Lansky offered to pitch in, but Lansky declined, wanting this to be a Jewish-only battle. Max Hinkes was a soldier for Abner “Longy” Zwillman in Newark, New Jersey, and he recorded his own assault on a Nazi meeting, when they tossed stink bombs into the gathering.
“As they came out of the room,” said Hinkes, “running from the terrible odor of the stink bombs and running down the steps into the street to escape, our boys were waiting with bats and iron bars. It was like running a gauntlet. Our boys were lined up on both sides and we started hitting, aiming for their heads or any other part of their bodies, with our bats and bars. The Nazis were screaming blue murder. This was one of the most happy moments of my life.”
Such clashes brought unwelcome publicity to Lansky, who in his desire to beat the Nazis was edging into the spotlight that he had blamed for Luciano’s imprisonment. Jewish newspapers began to describe him as a leading mobster, and none of his establishment friends could shield him from the attention. It was this, plus the fact that their bloody assaults on Nazis were starting to garner negative publicity, that led him to halt his fight against the German American Bund.
Fortunately, by 1939 the U.S. government was peering into the affairs of Fritz Kuhn, leader of the Bund, and following a massive rally at Madison Square Garden to celebrate Washington’s birthday, he was arrested and jailed for stealing from party funds. A later proposed alliance between the Bund and the Ku Klux Klan came to nothing and the organization disbanded in 1941.
Lansky’s experience fighting Nazis in the late 1930s is crucial to understanding underworld events in the 1940s when the United States was at war with Nazi Germany. Alongside earlier battles against American Fascists, it demonstrated that there was a willingness among law-abiding citizens to deploy mobsters in a crusade against anti-American forces.
As Lansky himself put it: “The reason why I cooperated was because of strong personal convictions. I wanted the Nazis beaten. I made this my number one priority even before the United States got into the war. I was a Jew and I felt for those Jews in Europe who were suffering. They were my brothers.”
The realization that the U.S. establishment—indeed, even the government—might be willing to associate itself with mobsters to fight Nazis enabled Lansky to forge ahead with his big idea to get his old pal Luciano out of jail. It was a long shot—but it was the only way Luciano was going to grab a fistful of fresh air.
11
TALKING TO THE DEVIL HIMSELF
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was a lucky break for Charlie Luciano. The next day, President Roosevelt took the United States to war against Japan and three days later Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy joined the conflict against the United States. Luciano had been in jail for more than five years and he hated it.
“In the summer it’s like a hothouse,” he told Lansky. “It stinks like a human being who’s never washed in his life. In winter the wind comes right through you and you can see the ice forming on the inside walls. That’s why we call it Siberia. It’s the worst place in the world. It would be better to be dead than to stay here.” But as America entered a brutal world war, there was a chink of light for the mobster. Having thrown away the key on Public Enemy No. 1, it might just be that the authoriti
es now needed his help.
In the first six months of 1942, Nazi Germany put enormous pressure on the transatlantic supply route between Britain and America. Freed by Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, Axis U-boats torpedoed remorselessly any Allied ship they caught along the East Coast. From the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in the north, all the way down the eastern seaboard to the Caribbean, German submarines sank more than three hundred Allied vessels. In just six days in January 1941, submarine raiders destroyed a ten-thousand-ton merchant ship near Novia Scotia, a Norwegian oil tanker sixty miles off the New York coast, and a U.S. merchant steamer, a Latvian freighter, and a U.S. tanker, all off North Carolina.
On February 23, President Roosevelt admitted in a radio address to the nation the extent of this naval carnage. “We have most certainly suffered losses,” he said, “from Hitler’s U-boats in the Atlantic as well as from the Japanese in the Pacific—and we shall suffer more of them before the turn of the tide.”
The reason why the president was forced to admit this defeat may well have been the most high-profile naval loss of all—the sinking of the troopship Normandie just two weeks before in full view of thousands of New Yorkers. This was a very visible blow to American military prestige.
The disaster happened on the afternoon of February 9, 1942. The Normandie was a French-built luxury ocean liner that was being converted into a troop carrier for ten thousand American troops crossing the Atlantic to join the war in Europe. Unquestionably, it was a major target for any enemy action. Just over two weeks before she was ready to set sail, a fire broke out in the grand salon of the promenade deck of the Normandie. The flames rapidly spread throughout the ship. It was moored in the Hudson River at Pier 88, at West Forty-eighth Street in New York Harbor, and the huge cloud of smoke rising above its three funnels attracted crowds from Manhattan.
“Air raid wardens and auxiliary firemen came from all parts of the city in response to an urgent call,” said a newspaper report. “They arrived by taxi, by private automobile and on foot, each with his identifying armband and card. They were quickly pressed into service, along with sailors, workmen, police and ordinary volunteers, to serve as stretcher bearers, to help carry fire hoses and to assist in many other ways. The general scene was one of a war catastrophe.”
Some fifteen hundred servicemen and workers were evacuated, but 128 were injured and one died from his wounds. As tugboats sprayed the hull with water, it was thought the fire had been brought under control, but in the early hours of the next day, a new disaster struck. The Normandie was listing dangerously.
“A little past 2 this morning,” said a witness, “the increasing sag was reflected in clattering sounds from the upper decks, as articles began to topple towards the sea-dipping rail. Tense watchers gasped, hoping the bottom mud would retain its precarious grasp on the keel. But at 2:35, quietly, with little disturbance or noise, as search-lights played upon the great hulk erratically, the once-beautiful ship slipped over on her port side.” And there she would stay for four years, rotting in the mud, until she was sold for scrap. In one terrible night, the U.S. Navy’s greatest troop-carrying asset—worth $56 million—had been wiped out.
As the hundreds of workmen on board huddled in side-street bars, they talked over the events. Some claimed there had been more than one fire and that was why it had spread so rapidly. Again and again, they kept coming back to the same conclusion—sabotage. It seemed that the fire on the Normandie had been set deliberately to knock it out of the war. Official reports denied this was the cause.
Naval authorities spoke to a man who said he saw a worker using an acetylene torch. Sparks from this sprayed around the shield and set light to bales of wood shavings used for packing. This ignited in a flash that reached the ceiling. Another account said that the sparks set alight a pile of life preservers. It was a full eleven minutes before any fire service could start putting out the flames, by which time the fire had a firm grip on the decks. It was the flood of water from fireboats that contributed to its list and turned it over.
Despite this explanation, the sinking of the Normandie and its possible connection to enemy sabotage lodged in the popular imagination. Shortly afterward, all lights visible from the sea along the waterfront areas of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island were ordered extinguished for the duration of the war. It was feared that enemy spies were communicating with German U-boats—giving them information on the sailing of ships and their course.
Four months later came the sensational news that the FBI had arrested eight trained German saboteurs in New York and Chicago. They had been landed by German submarines at two locations—Amagansett on Long Island and Ponte Vedra Beach in Florida. The men were caught carrying explosives and more than $170,000, plus maps and plans for a two-year operation of attacks on American war defense factories, railways, water works, and bridges in the East and Midwest. All the spies admitted their intention of sabotage. It could not be any more clear: There was an enemy within.
Further headlines added to the fever of concern. On September 21, 1942, the New York Times carried a story pointing the finger at a Japanese naval officer who had been masquerading as an engineering inspector with offices in New York. He had been at the heart of a spy ring in June 1941 conspiring to smuggle examples of American weapons on ships sailing to Japan. But he could just as easily have been planning his own version of Pearl Harbor. It was a chilling thought that only heightened American government anxiety over the vulnerability of the East Coast.
How concerned U.S. Naval Intelligence was about the danger from foreign agents was revealed just twelve years later in a secret government report. Despite reassurances at the time, it said: “The fear of sabotage on the piers and docks and throughout the port was great. In February, the burning of the ‘Normandie’ at her pier in the North River intensified the fear that saboteurs were active in the port.” And this was from the intelligence agency that had full access to the naval investigation that claimed the burning was an accident. Clearly, they didn’t believe their own pronouncement on the affair. Added to this was the knowledge that many American citizens had been fervent supporters of Fascism and the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. It made for a toxic mix of enemy agents and native collaborators.
As a result of this climate of terror, the secret report concluded: “Naval Intelligence was required to take every possible measure to combat the enemy submarine activity and the activities of any enemy agents along the waterfront.”
The war was forcing the government into making an alliance with some very dark characters—among them Lucky Luciano.
“I’ll talk to anybody, a priest, a bank manager, a gangster, the devil himself,” said Lieutenant Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden, head of the U.S. Navy’s intelligence staff based in New York. “This is a war. American lives are at stake. It’s not a college game where we have to look up the rule book every minute, and we’re not running a headquarters office where regulations must be followed to the letter. I have a job to do.”
Haffenden was a tough-talking fifty-year-old career officer who had been in the navy since World War I. He was physically fearless and would later volunteer to be beach master during the invasion of Iwo Jima, where he came under heavy artillery fire. Talking straight to a few wise guys would not bother him at all. But the plan he had to execute came from his superiors.
Spooked by the burning of the Normandie, senior U.S. naval officers feared for the security of the East Coast. Commercial fishing fleets came under suspicion as possibly selling fuel and supplies to enemy submarines. U.S. Naval Intelligence felt confident that they had pro-Nazis under observation, but it was the Italian fishermen who crewed these fleets, sympathetic to Mussolini and the Italian Fascist cause, that worried them. Captain Roscoe C. MacFall was district intelligence officer for the Third Naval District and came up with the plan that was later dubbed “Operation Underworld.”
“Naval Intelligence was greatly interested in obtaining information about
the possibility that enemy agents might be landed on the coast,” said MacFall. “Likewise, Naval Intelligence sought information about enemy submarines in the coastal waters and the suspected danger that enemy submarines might be refueled through fishing boats or ex-rumrunners plying the coastal area and operated by criminal elements or others whose loyalty might be subverted by payments of money.” MacFall was talking about the network of liquor-smuggling small boats that had so successfully avoided interception during Prohibition.
It was only a short step for U.S. Naval Intelligence to consider talking to criminal elements based on the waterfront in the great cities—New York especially. To infiltrate the ports, Naval Intelligence agents were placed on trucks, in factories, hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, and bars. To get these jobs the agents needed union cards and these could be obtained only from union officials appointed by organized crime families. It was the Mob that ran the docks.
Captain MacFall understood this and gave the okay to Haffenden and his agents to talk to underworld figures. On March 7 and March 25, 1942, MacFall and Haffenden met with District Attorney Frank Hogan and Lieutenant Colonel Murray I. Gurfein, who ran the DA’s Rackets Bureau. Gurfein had been a member of Dewey’s original legal team that put Luciano behind bars in 1936. As a result of these two meetings, they were put in touch with Joseph K. Guerin, attorney for Joe “Socks” Lanza, the forty-one-year-old so-called czar of Fulton Fish Market. Lanza’s gang had taken over the waterfront Teamsters union, looted their funds, and extorted regular weekly payments from everyone working for them. If anyone knew what was going on along the seaboard, Lanza did. At the time, he was under indictment on charges of conspiracy and extortion, but through the intercession of his attorney and the DA’s Colonel Gurfein, a meeting with Lanza was arranged.
Near midnight on March 25, on a bench in Riverside Park on the Upper West Side, Gurfein told Lanza about the fears of Naval Intelligence. “It’s a matter of great urgency. Many of our ships are being sunk along the Atlantic coast,” he said. “You know the people engaged in commercial fishing. You can find out how and where the submarines are being refueled.”
