Boardwalk Gangster

by Tim Newark

  Recently, a group of American tourists intoxicated with highballs and daiquiris went to the Jockey Club roulette tables to try to win back what they lost at the races. Two Cuban friends, who knew the situation, tried to dissuade them. But the Americans insisted and began to lose immediately. On the last play, they won and should have received $442 but only got $342. The Americans protested and immediately two strong arm men were called and recommended that they leave.

  When they returned home, the Americans reported the incident to the mayor of Miami and the tourist authority. “With this type of publicity,” concluded the magazine, “Havana will soon equal the reputation of Chicago during the time of Torrio and Capone.”

  American tourists also told the Cuban tourist police they believed the tables were fixed at the casino at the Hotel Nacional and Oriental Park Racetrack and said they had seen dice being palmed by American gamblers running the craps tables.

  Other local press in Havana claimed that Luciano had links with at least twenty prominent Cuban officials. Luciano told the reporters he had no intention of running narcotics on the island, but a U.S. Treasury representative at the American embassy in Havana was not so easily reassured. He said he had received information indicating that Luciano might well be attempting to establish himself in the trafficking of illegal narcotics.

  Clearly, the FBI was more than happy to gather as much information as they could from Luciano while he was in custody in Cuba, but was not sure what to do with him next. It was up to another U.S. government department to insist on firmer action being taken. On February 22, the FBI received a radiogram informing them that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), headed by Harry J. Anslinger, was taking the action needed to get Luciano out of Cuba. It would cause a diplomatic crisis.

  The FBN informed the Cuban government they would cut off all shipments of legal narcotics to Cuba until Luciano was expelled from the country. The decision made headlines throughout the island. With all this negative publicity, Luciano agreed to return to Italy rather than wait for deportation proceedings. The FBI had no evidence that Luciano was involved in illegal trafficking of narcotics, but a special representative of the Treasury Department arriving at the U.S. embassy said he had “definite proof.”

  In retaliation to the American threat, Cuban Liberal Party representative José Suarez Rivas proposed: “I am going to request the president of the Congress to ask President Grau to suspend shipments of sugar to the United States until Jose Martinez, who has been expelled from Cuba and is head of a sugar black market in the United States, and who at present is living in Miami, Florida, is deported from the United States to Catalonia, Spain, which is his native land.” It never happened.

  The Cuban press generally supported their government’s decision to deport Luciano, although they would have preferred a more diplomatic and less threatening approach from the United States. Antigovernment papers claimed the affair revealed the corrupt state of the police force, while left-wingers denounced American “imperialism.” On one weekly radio program, Senator Eduardo Chibas accused Senator Francisco Prio Socarris of protecting Luciano. The next day, this resulted in a fistfight on the floor of the Cuban senate between Chibas and Socarris. It was rumored that a duel would follow to settle the matter of honor.

  On February 27, President Grau signed a decree classifying Luciano as an undesirable alien in Cuba in view of his past criminal activities and ordered his deportation. The American embassy then advised the Cuban Ministry of State that no actual embargo on shipments of narcotics had been put into place despite the threatening statements of agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

  However, Colonel George White, a senior federal narcotics agent, continued to brief the press with negative stories about Luciano. In the Washington Post for March 14, a gunman suspected of killing James M. Ragen, owner of the racing National News Service, was linked to Luciano. White further disclosed that the “slayings of Carramusa and Ignacio Antanori [narcotics case witnesses], killed at Tampa, Florida, early in 1945, had been arranged by Luciano, former New York crime head.” It all helped to sway public opinion against the mobster.

  An FBI profile on Bugsy Siegel put further flesh on the Ragen case by explaining that Ragen had been targeted by New York gangsters because he ran the wire service business, which communicated all news of racing results throughout the country. As the FBI noted, the Mob was “attempting to take over the wire service and if they are successful in so doing will extort tribute from every bookmaker in the United States.”

  At 1:00 P.M. on March 20, 1947, Luciano accepted defeat and set sail on the Turkish boat, SS Bakir, destined for Genoa via the Canary Islands. He said he intended to return to South America after getting back to Italy, or perhaps even disembarking at the Canary Islands to catch another ship. His anger was directed at the American authorities that put the pressure on the Cubans to kick him out. He suggested Venezuela or Mexico as possible destinations, claiming his “original intention in coming to Cuba was to be near his friends and relatives who resided in the United States.”

  FBI chief Hoover personally sent messages to South American embassies, including Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, warning them against Luciano’s arrival.

  After his voyage back to Italy from Cuba, Luciano spent nine days in jail in Genoa. He was then sent under the escort of two armed carabinieri to Palermo, where he spent nine more days in jail. From there, he moved to Rome, where he set up a fancy apartment. Luciano’s dream of settling in a country near to his old friends had been blown apart. He was furious. From now on, he was restricted to operating in Italy.

  Twelve years after the Cuban fiasco, the corrupt regime backed by President Batista collapsed in the wake of a Communist revolution and the Mafia lost all their valuable gambling investments—a hit that would cost Luciano 25 percent of his future investment income.

  14

  COLD WAR WARRIOR

  The Grand Hotel et Des Palmes, halfway along the stylish Via Roma in central Palermo, was the smartest hotel in Sicily in 1947. Its marble-and-mirror deluxe rooms entertained the richest businessmen in town. On July 5, Mr. A. E. Watkins of the British consulate filed a report on Charles Luciano, saying he was staying at the hotel.

  “This bandit, or ex-bandit, is very much in the public eye,” noted Watkins. “He has two luxurious American motor cars; dresses and lives expensively, and is often to be seen in the company of an elegant but vulgar Italian-American woman.”

  Watkins went further. His job was to pick up on local gossip and sketch in the relationships between important people.

  “I am told, on good authority,” he said, “that some of the leading members of the Mafia have called on him at the hotel on more than one occasion. Rumour has it that he is now in somebody’s pay working against the communists.”

  In the same report, Watkins mentioned that the notorious Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano had issued a manifesto in which he pledged to switch his activities from his usual lawbreaking to an assault on the Sicilian Communist party. Giuliano called on his fellow Sicilians to oppose the “Red gangsters”—“Those men who want to throw us into the lap of that terrible Russia where liberty is a chimera and democracy a legend must be fought.” The CIA couldn’t have put it better!

  The British consulate officer wondered at the veracity of the so-called manifesto and believed it might have emanated “from an interested party under the assumed name of Giuliano.” He then concluded that this event might well be linked to his comments on Luciano also being deployed against Sicilian Communists.

  It is tantalizing material that has never been picked up in any other book on Luciano, and there is a dimension to it that seems highly possible—that Luciano was a Cold War agent. His wartime work brought him very close to government intelligence agencies, so the avenues of contact were already there, and Luciano’s own personal views were bluntly anti-Communist.

  Added to this are two further connections. The OSS, forerunners of the CIA,
had established close links with the Mafia in Sicily through their agents in wartime Palermo. Luciano had a personal link to the OSS through Lieutenant Colonel Murray I. Gurfein, who had been part of the team that first put Luciano in contact with Naval Intelligence. Luciano also had a strong relationship with chief Sicilian mafioso Don Calogero Vizzini, who three years earlier had tried to kill Girolamo Li Causi, the leader of the Sicilian Communist party when he came to Villalba to give a rabble-rousing speech. Li Causi was at the top of Giuliano’s hit list and posed an even greater threat to postwar Sicily now that the Communist movement had grown in strength.

  To understand this web of Cold War conspiracies into which Luciano ventured, it is important to understand the shifting interests of the Americans in Sicily since World War II.

  Having punctured the myth that Luciano and the Mafia directly helped the Americans conquer Sicily, there is another equally strongly believed legend that it was the Americans who put the Mafia back into power after their long subjugation under Mussolini and the Fascists. It is a belief held even by local Sicilians, but the truth is somewhat different. At first, the invading Americans and British saw the Mafia for what they were—a criminal organization that grew rich off the back of its own intimidated people.

  With the Fascists gone from their island, Mafia gangs thought they could get back into business, but the Allied authorities—known as AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory)—were intent on establishing law and order. Major General Francis Rennell Rodd was the British head of AMGOT and he knew exactly what the Mafia was all about. “The aftermath of war and the breakdown of central provincial authority,” he observed, “provide a good culture ground for the virus.”

  By “virus,” Rennell meant the Mafia. He came down hard on the black market and any racketeering. When he heard a wealthy landowner had been stabbed to death for refusing the advances of the local Mafia, he had the suspected murderers arrested and put on trial before a military tribunal. Unable to threaten local jurors, the two Mafia hit men were found guilty and shot by a firing squad.

  This official attitude was matched by several high-profile operations against Mafia bases. Aided by a major who had special knowledge of breaking up racketeering gangs in New York, the U.S. Third Division stormed a Mafia fortress near Palermo in September 1943 and arrested two leading mafiosi.

  “The Mafia, Sicilian extortionist gang that fascism tried for years to rub up,” said the New York Times, “has been smashed from the top … . It follows that breaking the Mafia gang means breaking the black market.”

  Of course, the power vacuum left by removing Fascist authority in Sicily meant that many anti-Fascist replacement figures were, in fact, local mafiosi. Lord Rennell admitted this, saying the Allies “have fallen into the trap of appointing the most pushing and obvious person, who in certain cases are now suspected of being the local Mafia leaders … . It will take quite a long time for the Allied Military Government to weed out the good from the bad.” Although he said this, clearly his intention was not to hand government back to criminal organizations. A major incentive in this drive against the Mafia was that they were irritating AMGOT by giving support to a Separatist movement in the island.

  For years, Sicilians resented the heavy hand of central Italian government and dreamed of becoming an autonomous nation. Under Allied rule, some Sicilian politicians believed their opportunity had come to push the case for becoming separate from mainland Italy. Top mafiosi could see the potential for establishing an independent criminal kingdom and strongly backed the movement. Don Calogero Vizzini was a leading proponent of Separatism and deployed his henchmen to battle against their opponents—including both Monarchists and Socialists.

  While the Allies were directly in control of the island they tried to keep a lid on these activities, but when they handed back rule to the Italian government in 1944, the conflict broke out into open warfare. Vizzini and his like-minded mafiosi recruited bandits such as Salvatore Giuliano to form a Voluntary Army for Sicilian Independence, called EVIS. Throughout 1945, armed with captured German weapons, including armored cars and tanks, and dressed in khaki uniforms, the bandit army attacked police bases in Sicily and killed a number of carabinieri. The situation became so serious that the Italian government was forced to send its own troops to fight the Mafia-backed campaign for independence.

  At one stage the arrest of Don Calogero Vizzini was suggested as a way of decapitating the Separatist movement, but a chilling warning was passed on by an intermediary to the Italian government. “This intermediary has declared that because of the threatened arrest of Vizzini,” noted an American intelligence report in February 1945, “the Maffia [sic] has threatened to order active participation by the Sicilian Maffia on the side of the EVIS and the outlaw bands. Because of their known power, this would mean real civil war in Sicily.” Vizzini’s proposed arrest was said to have been provoked by the confession of an EVIS rebel stating that he had been personally recruited to the bandit army by Vizzini to fight against the carabinieri. Instead of arrest, Don Calo was advised to get out of Palermo.

  Neither the Americans nor British condoned this action and just wanted to see an end to the Mafia. So, contrary to popular myth, the entire wartime policy of the Americans and the British toward the Mafia was one of irritation and suppression. By the time Charles Luciano was deported to Italy in early 1946, however, the political map was beginning to change.

  Setting up his office in the plush rooms of the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes in Palermo, at the top of Luciano’s list of people to see was Don Calogero Vizzini. Don Calo had taken control of much of the black market in western Sicily and was trading back and forth with mainland Italy. He was the Sicilian end of the black market empire established by Vito Genovese during his period in Naples.

  Until the summer of 1943, Genovese had ingratiated himself with the Fascist regime, supplying heroin and other drugs to many of its prominent figures, but his comfortable accommodation with the Fascists came to an end when the Allies invaded Sicily. Suddenly, Genovese was on the losing side. Having recovered from the shock, he quickly seized upon this as a new criminal opportunity that could bring in much more money than his small-time deals under the Fascists.

  Genovese volunteered his services as an interpreter and local fixer to the American officers that arrived in Nola, near Naples, where he lived. Indeed, some of them were so impressed with his abilities that they wrote him letters of recommendation. “He would accept no pay,” said Major Holmgreen, “paid his own expenses, worked day and night and rendered most valuable assistance to the Allied Military Government.”

  Genovese certainly worked night and day—lining his own pocket. With such close contacts inside the U.S. Army, he was able to corner the market in stolen Allied goods. His Camorra—Neapolitan Mafia—gangsters stole American military trucks, drove them into army supply depots, loaded them up with food, cigarettes, and medicine, and then transported them to dealers in the black market. Some of these goods were shipped from Naples to Sicily, where they were distributed by Don Calo. A U.S. Army report estimated that 65 percent of the income of Neapolitans was derived from the black market in stolen American goods and that one-third of all supplies and equipment brought into Italy by the Allies ended up in criminal hands. To remove goods from American bases on such a vast scale demanded a number of inside personnel on Genovese’s payroll. Some of these corrupt military personnel could have been very high ranking indeed.

  A name that comes up again and again in conjunction with the Mafia infiltration of the U.S. Army is Colonel Charles Poletti. He’d been a rising star back in legal circles in the United States. Indeed, at the age of just thirty-eight he had been the youngest Italian-American to rise to the post of lieutenant governor of New York under Thomas E. Dewey. In 1943, he was appointed American senior civil affairs officer in Palermo, but almost immediately got a reputation for dealing with senior Mafia figures in Sicily, many of them closely involved with the Separatist mo
vement.

  Lord Rennell, head of AMGOT, was none too keen on him and refused to recommend him for promotion to the post of administrative director, saying he was “most unsuitable for this appointment.” One of Rennell’s colleagues was more explicit, saying Poletti “has clearly run Sicily with enthusiasm and gusto though the shadow of Tammany Hall may have been thrown lightly across the Island.”

  In 1944, Poletti was appointed to a senior position in the Allied Military Government in mainland Italy. This brought him into the realm of Vito Genovese, and the mobster made sure he was on board. It is interesting to note that in The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, the only reference to Poletti comes from Luciano, who calls him “one of our good friends.”

  Further evidence of Poletti’s role as high-ranking shield to the Mafia came with the arrest of Vito Genovese in August 1944. Plucky twenty-four-year-old U.S. Sergeant Orange C. Dickey took on the task of tracking down the mobster—with little help from his senior colleagues. A former member of the Camorra first put him on to Genovese’s role as king of the black market in southern Italy. Dickey then arrested two Canadian soldiers who had deserted to drive trucks for the mobster.

  As Dickey gathered his material to make his move on Genovese, he sent a request for information to Colonel Poletti’s office in Rome, but the Allied Military Government (AMG) denied having any knowledge of Genovese being employed by them. They then confused matters further by identifying him as an ex-prisoner ten years older than the real gangster.

  Accompanied by two British soldiers, Dickey courageously arrested Genovese in Nola. In jail, Genovese denied any knowledge whatsoever of the black market in Italy, but when Dickey searched his apartment he found a number of official AMG passes giving him access to U.S. Army fuel and food supplies. Having put Genovese behind bars, Dickey needed to know what he should do next with him. Should he put him on trial by the military authorities or send him back to the United States to face civilian justice?