Boardwalk Gangster

by Tim Newark

  When Genovese was returned to America, he still had the charge of murdering Ferdinand Boccia hanging over him. The chief witness to the killing was Peter La Tempa, serving time in jail. Shortly after news came through to him of his extradition to the United States, friends of Genovese made contact with the prison authorities holding the witness. When he woke one morning with acute kidney stone pain, he was given sedatives strong enough to “kill eight horses.” With La Tempa dead, there was little evidence against Genovese and he walked the charge.

  “By devious means,” said the judge, “among which were the terrorizing of witnesses, kidnapping them, yes, even murdering those who could give evidence against you, you have thwarted justice time and again.”

  Genovese was a formidable foe adept at playing a deadly game of chess with his rivals. Luciano knew Genovese wanted to step into his shoes after he was exiled to Italy, but he trusted Frank Costello more to look after his own concerns. Luciano depended on the flow of money from his investments in the United States, and only Lansky and Costello could be trusted to deliver this. Luciano wanted Costello to remain in charge of affairs, but recognized Genovese’s seniority by letting him take over the business while Costello paid back Las Vegas money to the Mob. Costello—ever the great politician of the syndicate—also worked hard to pay full respect to Genovese, but this wasn’t clear enough for the wannabe boss of bosses.

  “Vito should have understood that from the way Frankie handled a charity dinner he gave at the Copacabana in 1949,” recalled retired mafioso Angelo Torriani. “Frankie was great for that sort of thing. He loved showing off what a great guy he was in public, and so when he gave Vito Genovese the place of honor at that dinner, that man should have known that he was aces, that he was tops, that he was being treated like a capo should be. Maybe that was too quiet a way for Vito to get the message. He wanted things down in black and white.”

  Joe Valachi, a gunman for Genovese, was also aware of the tension.

  “It was a bad time for us,” he said. “Everyone was a little nervous. I felt at any moment I could get hit with a shotgun blast.” He blamed it on Genovese’s maneuvering. “Vito is like a fox. He takes his time,” Valachi said.

  Genovese began his move against Costello by bringing Carlo Gambino, a rising mafioso who was hungry to take over his position close to him. He next made a move against Willie Moretti, a childhood pal of Costello, and master of his own army of sixty gunmen in New Jersey. It was Moretti who had become godfather to the young Frank Sinatra and got him out of a contract by putting a gun into the mouth of his bandleader, Tommy Dorsey. By 1950, Moretti was suffering from advanced syphilis and his rambling monologues were seen to be a threat to the discretion of the Mafia. When he was called before the Kefauver Committee, many mobsters grew nervous. In the event, he talked freely but gave very little away, declaring he couldn’t be a member of the Mafia because he didn’t possess a membership card.

  But he kept on talking to the press, and Genovese used this to get at Costello, accusing him of a lack of judgment by constantly shielding Morretti. Valachi remembered his insistent conversations on the subject: “He says it is sad about Willie and that it ain’t his fault. He is just sick in the head, but if he is allowed to keep talking, he is going to get us all in a jam.”

  On the morning of October 4, 1951, Moretti sat down to a meeting with three other men in Joe’s Elbow Room Restaurant at 793 Palisades Avenue in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. When the wife of the owner and the waitress went into the kitchen, they heard gunfire. When they came out, they saw Moretti sprawled on the floor with blood pouring out the back of his head over the hexagonal patterned linoleum. The other men were gone.

  Frank Costello’s lawyer knew the significance of the murder. “Everyone in the underworld knew that Frank was Willie’s protector. The murder of Willie was a violent announcement that Frank’s power as the king was under direct threat.”

  The problem for Costello was that his power was already fading because of his appearance before the Kefauver Committee. He was no longer invisible and soon other law enforcers exploited his vulnerability. Two trials followed in which Costello was charged with contempt of Congress. At the second trial he was found guilty and sentenced, at the age of sixty-one, to eighteen months in prison. He was then pursued by IRS investigators, and in 1954 he was sentenced to five years in prison for tax evasion. He appealed, of course, but if he wasn’t in jail, he spent most of his time in and out of court. It was no way to run organized crime, and this played effectively into Genovese’s hands.

  With the death of Moretti, Costello had sought a new enforcer and encouraged Albert Anastasia, Luciano’s old hit man. He allowed Anastasia to murder Vincent Mangano and take over his crime family in 1951. But the power went to Anastasia’s head and he put a contract out on a Brooklyn salesman called Arnold Schuster just because he didn’t like the way Schuster boasted on TV about his role as prime witness against a bank robber. The murder of Schuster brought a lot of heat on the Mafia, and Genovese used this concern about the kill-crazy Anastasia to lure other mobsters away from him, including his underboss Carlo Gambino and Joe Profaci.

  So far, Meyer Lansky had managed to stay out of the growing antagonism between Costello and Genovese—he was too busy building his gambling business in Cuba—but he always knew Genovese was bad news for Luciano and his friends. He believed it was Genovese who was behind the apparent suicide of Longy Zwilllman, another old-time crime boss who, in February 1955, was found hanging from a wire in the basement of his New Jersey home. When Lansky visited Luciano in Italy, he had told him about his misgivings, finally convincing Lucky of their rival’s devious plans.

  “You were so against Vito even in those [early] days,” Luciano told Lansky, “that I thought you were being unfair to him. OK, Little Man, you handle Vito as you think best. I know you’ll wait for the right moment.”

  But it was Genovese who finally made the big push against Luciano’s key associates. Surprised by Frank Costello’s sudden release from prison over the IRS case, pending an appeal, Genovese hastily put together a hit. On the evening of May 2, 1957, Costello had dinner with Philip Kennedy, a former baseball player and head of a modeling agency. They shared a cab back to Costello’s apartment at 115 Central Park West, and as he said good-bye to his friend, a powerfully built man scurried past him into the lobby of his apartment building. When Costello walked into the entrance hall, the big man pulled a gun and said, “This is for you, Frank.”

  Costello raised his arm to shield himself from the point-blank shot, but blood spurted out from the wound on the side of his head. It looked as though Genovese had achieved the ultimate blow against the old Luciano family—the death strike he had long dreamed of.

  Miraculously, Costello survived the assassination attempt, the bullet merely grazing the side of his head. Everyone knew that Genovese had ordered the hit—he was the only mafioso of the stature to order such a high-ranking assault. It was a tremendous gamble, too. To slay the king and then fail to finish him off could bring the whole wrath of organized crime down on him. Joe Valachi and other Genovese gunmen were summoned to an urgent meeting.

  “We were told we got to get ready,” said Valachi. “There could be war over this.” Genovese retreated to his Atlantic Highlands mansion with a small army of loyal soldiers.

  But nothing happened. Genovese had played the game too well and was too strong to be punished. Instead, Costello had to endure the humiliation of facing his assassin in court—Vincent “the Chin” Gigante—and saying nothing. Costello didn’t recognize him, he told the jury. At the end of the trial, Gigante was acquitted and walked over to Costello. He shook his hand and said, “Thanks, Frank.”

  Six months later, Genovese sought to wrap up the loose ends of Costello’s demise by taking on his strong-arm man. On October 25, 1957, at 10:15 A.M., Albert Anastasia strolled into his favorite barbershop in the Park Sheraton Hotel on Seventh Avenue. He took chair number four and told the barber to giv
e him a haircut. The barber draped a cloth around the gangster’s neck and switched on some electric clippers. Anastasia shut his eyes and relaxed.

  A couple of minutes later, two men entered the barbershop with the lower part of their faces hidden behind scarves like old-fashioned robbers. One of then told the shop’s owner: “Keep your mouth shut if you don’t want your head blown off.” The gunmen stood directly behind Anastasia, who still had his eyes shut—half asleep in his chair—and opened fire at the same time.

  “Anastasia leaped forward with the first report,” said a front-page story. “His heavy feet kicked at the foot rest and tore it away. He landed on his feet, weaving. He did not turn around to face the killers. He lunged further forward, still facing the mirror. The second spurt of bullets threw him against the glass shelving in front of the mirror. He grabbed for the shelving and brought a glass of bay rum to the tiles with a shattering crash. He took two further shots. Then the last shot—so the police figure it—took him [in the] back of the head.”

  The gunmen said nothing as they fled. They dropped their guns—one in a trash basket near the West Fifty-seventh Street subway station. This time, the assassins had made sure their victim was dead—they didn’t want to face his vengeance.

  Within hours of the shooting, Frank Costello went to see the dead man’s brother, Tony Anastasio, and they hung on to each other, weeping. Costello was a broken man. He had no defense against Genovese and immediately went into retirement, handing over most of his criminal assets to the victor.

  To Luciano in Naples, it looked as though Genovese was systematically wiping out anyone related to his old crime family. Who would be next? Lansky? Luciano himself? Although with his power severely reduced and many of his powerful friends gone, Luciano set about planning his revenge and in this was aided by a distinctly nervous Lansky.

  Genovese wanted a coronation to celebrate the beginning of his reign as boss of bosses and he chose a stone hilltop mansion at Apalachin in Tioga County in Upstate New York as the venue. He wanted a gathering of the top mafiosi from around the country. He wanted them to recognize him as their leader and accept a period of peace under his rule. It was the culmination of more than three decades of ambition. They met in the house of Joseph Barbara, a lieutenant in Stefano Magaddino’s Buffalo family. In the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wooded countryside for miles, it seemed a perfectly discreet place for such a meeting.

  The list of some sixty mobsters who turned up on November 14, 1957, less than three weeks after Anastasia’s killing, included many senior figures such as Profaci, Gambino, Magaddino, Miranda, Galante, Lucchese, Giancana, and Bonanno—although Bonanno later denied he had ever been there and claimed he had opposed the meeting. More significant, however, were the gangsters who refused to turn up. Frank Costello said he was under constant surveillance after the attempt on his life. Meyer Lansky was unwell and had to stay in Florida for his health. Obviously, Luciano wasn’t there. What happened next was recorded with glee by the newspapers of the time.

  “Elaborate preparations had been made for the meeting,” reported the New York Times. “Nobody was likely to go hungry. The host had ordered $432 worth of special cuts, including 200 pounds of choice steaks, twenty pounds of veal cutlets, whole hams and other meats. The approximately sixty guests came in Cadillacs, Chrysler Imperials, Lincolns and other high-priced cars.”

  Joseph Barbara had rooms in two nearby motels booked for his guests. All this activity in a sleepy little hamlet aroused the interest of local state trooper Sergeant Edward Croswell. Within a short time after the arrival of the fleet of grand cars, the state troopers had thrown a cordon around the mansion and moved in before the meeting had barely got under way. In a panic, some senior mafiosi were reduced to scrambling out of windows and fleeing through the woods. It was a very undignified exit for men in their fifties and sixties and was a complete humiliation for Genovese. Why had he not organized the meeting at a location where the Mafia had bought the connivance of the local police? Costello would have done that—as would have Luciano.

  No one was arrested, but the combined criminal records of the guests were noted. They insisted they were there to pay a visit to Barbara, who had had four heart attacks since January of that year. It was a surprise there were no more heart attacks during the raid. A month after Apalachin, the press was still wondering about the purpose of the mysterious gathering. “The general opinion of law officers is that it was convened because of the murder of Albert Anastasia,” said one report. “It is believed that the Apalachin conference had probably met to discuss changes in the combine’s future operations.”

  Government agencies started a feeding frenzy of investigations. Immigration peered into the background of the Apalachin guests, whether they were aliens or naturalized citizens. The state tax department reexamined their income tax returns. The state parole board checked to see if any one of them had violated their parole conditions. Twenty-seven of the Apalachin gangsters were subpoenaed to appear before three days of public hearings.

  “The sensational publicity created by Apalachin affected me tremendously,” said Joseph Bonanno, “because up to then I had been relatively inconspicuous. Publicity can maim and destroy.” Barbara had a fatal heart attack and his estate was put up for sale. “The bad publicity generated by Apalachin helped destroy any hope of an intelligent examination of my Tradition,” claimed Bonanno. “Instead, the publicity perpetrated a myth … the myth of the ‘Mafia.’” In fact, it put even more pressure on the FBI to put all its efforts into taking apart what it dubbed the “Cosa Nostra.”

  In Naples, when Luciano read the newspaper reports, he cracked up with laughter. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of people, he sneered. But years later, it emerged that Luciano and Lansky were not mere passive observers of Genovese’s failure. They were active participants in it.

  “Meyer and I were invited [to Apalachin],” recalled his close friend Doc Stacher, “but he sent word that as it was November he did not want to make the journey north from Miami. He was suffering from flu at the time. In fact, none of Lansky’s closest friends went to the meeting.”

  What he did do was tip off the local sheriff about the meeting.

  “Nobody to this day knows that it was Meyer who arranged for Genovese’s humiliation.”

  It was an accomplished strike against their enemy—the Mafia had always been willing to use the police as a weapon when it suited them—but it was only just the beginning of their revenge on Genovese.

  According to Stacher, Lansky set a trap for Genovese using the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. One of his couriers, Nelson Cantellops, had been imprisoned for dealing drugs on the side and had been sent to Sing Sing. Lansky was furious with him but let it be known, through Nelson’s brother, that he would forgive him if he did one job for him. That task involved asking to talk to an FBN agent in prison and then spinning him a very precise story. Cantellops agreed and told the agent about how Genovese was organizing a major smuggling ring of narcotics from Europe to the United States.

  “Cantellops was very well briefed,” said Stacher. “He named Vito and 24 others. He gave exact details of where and how the drugs were imported, because Meyer had this information from his spies in the Genovese organization. The Narcotics Bureau was delighted with this information and in exchange got Nelson out of Sing Sing. Nelson was the main witness when Genovese and all his partners were convicted on narcotics charges.”

  In 1959, Genovese was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and died behind bars ten years later. Luciano and Lansky had got their revenge. Nelson Cantellops was rewarded with a $100,000 dollars and a job for life. It was said that his prize money was put up by Lansky and Luciano, along with Costello, who specified that he wanted Vincent Gigante nailed alongside Genovese as part of the narcotics setup—the incompetent gunman got seven years. Carlo Gambino, who had visited Luciano in Italy, apparently turned on his first Mafia patron and put up the final $25,000 of the money in an act
of solidarity with the old fellows. Gambino eventually came out of the affair as head of his own family. Cantellops later died in a barroom brawl.

  Genovese never knew the details of the plot against him but suspected something was not right and, believing one of his top aides was involved, had Tony Bender assassinated. He also wanted Valachi, whom he suspected was part of the setup, killed, and that’s when Valachi turned stool pigeon for the state.

  17

  LUCKY IN LOVE

  Igea Lissoni was twenty-six years old when Lucky Luciano first saw her. She later claimed a Milanese fortune-teller had told her she would meet the man of her dreams in Capri and she found him there in a vast suite taking up half a floor of the island’s best hotel. That was her mythologizing of the event. In reality, the beginning of their affair was more prosaic.

  It was in early 1948 at a dinner party in Milan that Luciano met the love of his life. Until that point, he had been happy to hang out with good-time girls and prostitutes, but this woman was different. She was elegant and refined and remained his close companion in Italy for the next ten years.

  Lissoni was a dancer. She came from a middle-class Milanese family and had been trained at ballet from an early age. She progressed to the La Scala Opera House, where she performed in their ballet company, but the leading roles eluded her. “I realized I could never become a prima ballerina,” she later admitted, “that I did not have enough talent. So I began to dance in nightclubs, hoping I could some day dance in films and perhaps become a star. My family was scandalized, of course, but I could wrap Papa around my finger.”