It was a unique opportunity. And the Cosa Nostra bosses couldn’t afford to miss that train. They had to take a chance and force New York prosecutor Thomas Dewey to come to an agreement about Lucky Luciano. But how?
Sante Genovese couldn’t answer that question. “You want to kidnap the prosecutor and make an equal exchange? We thought of it, but it’s too risky,” Genovese concluded.
“No, no kidnapping. Luciano would be against that,” Saro said.
“Then what is this brilliant idea?” Sante asked, intrigued.
“It’s simple. We’ll carry out various acts of sabotage at the Port of New York and on warships bound for Europe. We’ll bring the war effort to its knees. We’ll spread the rumor that the sabotage is the work of Nazi-fascist secret forces operating on American soil. We’ll see to it that word reaches the ears of the military command that our organization, owing to Lucky Luciano, could neutralize those subversive groups. After all, everyone knows that the waterfront is in the hands of the Anastasia brothers, who are notoriously devoted to Luciano. At that point, Luciano will have to intervene personally. Once this happens, we’ll ask the authorities to return the favor. That’s the idea. We’ll perform the acts of sabotage ourselves, after getting the all clear from the Anastasias. What do you say?”
What could Genovese say, except that it was worth a try? Just to be sure, however, he informed Luciano of Saro’s plan, and the boss readily consented. He liked the idea that the Cosa Nostra could even have a hand in the war. Finally, he was beginning to see a glimmer of hope for his future release.
Chapter 46
– 1942 –
History doesn’t report it, and the few who knew about it may have forgotten, but there was a time during the winter of 1942 when residents of New York feared they would see invading Nazis, as well as Japanese troops, set up operations amid the trees of Central Park.
Throughout the city, but particularly along the docks, accidents and incidents of sabotage occurred that were attributed to the special forces of the Third Reich’s secret service.
One of the first, most disturbing episodes occurred in the shipyards of Navy Pier 88.
For some weeks workers had been toiling to convert the French cruise ship the SS Normandie into a transport carrier for American troops.
The Normandie was the fastest transoceanic vessel at that time, able to complete the Le Havre–New York crossing in just four and a half days, thanks to a speed of over thirty knots. The Normandie had docked in New York on August 28, 1939, a few days before the Nazi invasion of Poland, and had been laid up in port since Europe went to war. Once the United States entered the war, the US Naval Command requisitioned the Normandie to convert it into a troop carrier. The vessel could transport up to twelve thousand combat-ready troops at a time, at a speed so fast it wouldn’t even require an escort of torpedo boats. It was renamed the USS Lafayette.
* * *
On February 9, 1942, Saro Ragusa and his friends lingered at Petrosino’s Cafe on West Fifty-Fourth Street near the Hudson River piers. Present at the table, besides Saro and Mastrangelo, were Carmine Mannino, Tommaso Sciacca, and Alex Pagano. Having done his military service in Friuli, Italy, with the fortifications unit of the US Corps of Engineers, Carmine Mannino knew all about mines and explosives in general. They had taught him how to bring down a bridge with only three charges and how to place active and passive obstacles in a given territory. Saro had accompanied him on his inspection during a twenty-minute walk along the pier, which had enabled Mannino to determine which locations the blast could damage most easily and thus where he should position the charges.
During lunch, they talked about everything except what they were about to do. Parked outside the restaurant was Saro’s brand new Packard 120-C Touring sedan, its roomy trunk packed with sticks of dynamite. They were in high spirits and laughed each time Tommaso Sciacca, the group’s clown, cracked a joke. They seemed like a group of old friends enjoying a get-together. Only Alex Pagano, the youngest of them all, was silent and gloomy. He had left his girlfriend back in the old country. His older friends told him, “Forget about Irene! Go lay some woman. Irene has probably already dumped you by now.” But the more they insisted, the more angrily he vowed that Irene would never leave him because they really loved each other.
It was past two o’clock in the afternoon, and they had to get a move on because in thirty minutes the whistle would signal the end of the first shift at the port and the start of the next. It was the moment when they could blend in with the other workers. The shift supervisors had already been advised. If they spotted an unfamiliar face, they were to simply look the other way and not ask questions.
Saro urged his pals to speed it up. Carmine ordered another ice cream and ate it in the car, on their way to the port. The dynamite was inside three black leather bags. Carrying them, Carmine, Alex, and Tommaso looked more like three undertakers going to dissect a corpse than three dockworkers.
“You could have chosen three bags that were less noticeable,” Mastrangelo criticized.
“I took the first ones I could find,” Tommaso said in excuse.
“Go on, get going; there’s the second whistle,” Saro broke in.
Saro and Mastrangelo stayed in the car and waited for the three to go off and mingle with the other workers entering the shipyard of the former Normandie.
Once the charges and detonators had been placed, the three would have to leave the pier and get away using public transportation.
Around three in the afternoon, New Yorkers were still at work when, from the upper windows of skyscrapers, they saw a column of smoke rising from one of the docks at the port. In a flash, the news spread throughout the city: a fire had broken out on the Lafayette, the cruise ship that was being altered for troop transport.
Fire engines and ambulances raced to pier 88. From other docks along the port, pilot boats, tugs with water cannons, and tankers rushed toward the ship, which was now engulfed in flames.
The main fire originated in the center of the vessel, in the spacious first-class lounge. But it wasn’t the only outbreak. Saro’s men had done a skillful job, placing four explosive primers that would be triggered one after the other in four different areas of the ship, in such a way that the sabotage would be passed off as a simple short circuit. Since the ship had been in the process of being overhauled, it was quite plausible that some careless workman might have left an open flame or forgotten to turn off his soldering iron.
Over time the various commissions investigating the incident never reached a decisive conclusion on the cause of the blaze and the newspapers referred to it as an unfortunate accident.
Throughout the afternoon, rescue teams flooded the vessel with water and foaming agents. The result was that during the night between February 9 and 10, due to the weight of all the water used to extinguish the fire, the Lafayette slowly rolled over, coming to rest on its port side. The ship remained that way, with one side semisubmerged, until the end of the war—a grim testament to the lengths a Mafia organization would go to achieve its objectives.
* * *
Prince Licata’s plan did not end with that first major show of force.
In late February, Saro, with the help of some explosives experts who had served in the Italian Army before fleeing to America, had thirteen Liberty merchant ships mined beneath the waterline. The ships were due to set sail for England, carrying troops and war equipment. As soon as the vessels left New York Harbor, they were shaken by thirteen explosions that split them in two and caused them to sink in just minutes. It was a mass execution for sailors and soldiers; only a few were rescued because no one had time to put on a life jacket. Eight hundred crewmen perished in the flames or were drowned.
An obsession with spies spread throughout the city. To stem the panic, the authorities were forced to take extremely unpopular measures. They sent thousands of Italian, German, and Japanese immigrants into internment camps, insisting that spies and saboteurs may have infiltr
ated those groups.
That did not solve the sabotage problem, however. In addition to the 71 merchant ships sunk in February 1942, another 49 were lost between March and April, while in May no fewer than 102 Liberty ships were attacked by German U-boat submarines or sabotaged by the Mafia.
Naval officials were in a panic. The navy’s chief of staff, Lieutenant Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden, was no longer so sure that it was German U-boats sinking the Liberty ships in US territorial waters. In all those months, US Navy torpedo-boat destroyers had been able to identify only one of them. It was possible, however, that the city was swarming with Nazi saboteurs, or so they thought. But where had they come from? When had they landed in America? Was it conceivable that they couldn’t be found? The few spies that the FBI had caught up until that point had all been executed, after summary proceedings that were well publicized in the newspapers and on the radio. Where were they hiding, those covert forces that constantly defied surveillance and freely held sway over the Port of New York?
The answer began to appear in the Navy Department’s morning reports: those forces were the Mafia.
Commander Haffenden, with the help of New York City’s new district attorney, Frank Hogan—the man who succeeded the cunning Dewey in 1941 when he stepped down from the prosecutor’s office to become a candidate for governor—decided that it was time to engage in direct discourse with the port’s union bosses in order to get through to the Cosa Nostra.
He never thought he would ever do or say such a thing in his life, but the war effort took priority over any moralistic considerations.
* * *
After the slaughter at La Tonnara, Tom Bontade had barricaded himself in his house in Beechhurst, a residential area of Queens. He had lost his most trusted men in the war with Ferdinando Licata. The only senior men he had now were Vito Pizzuto and his henchman Roy Boccia. In the last several months, Bontade had thought more than once of retiring permanently from the business, but he didn’t want to give in and let the interlopers win. He had enough money to rebuild a team of soldiers ready and willing to do anything he asked. But the problem wasn’t in finding a handful of violent individuals, for the city’s streets were filled with them. The thing hardest to come by these days was loyalty. For the moment, the only man he could rely on besides Boccia was the Sicilian from Salemi who’d been the last to join the family: Vito Pizzuto.
Pizzuto, for his part, was aware that he served a boss who was now getting by solely on his past. He still had control of the territory, but how long could he hold on to it if he was no longer seen in circulation? Pizzuto’s only regret was that he had failed in his attempt on the prince’s life. He had even tried to locate Licata’s hiding place, to finish the job he’d started, but no one would help him. The fact that the prince hadn’t been seen around after so long could mean that he’d managed to survive, but it could also mean that the explosion might have damaged his spinal cord, paralyzing him. If that were the case, then his power was actually hanging by a thread, and all Pizzuto had to do was sever it to seize control of what Licata had aggressively taken from Brian Stoker’s family.
Vito Pizzuto was looking for a way to find out the truth about Licata. Everyone knew that the interests of the family were now controlled by Saro Ragusa, with Jack Mastrangelo as consigliori. The three men had formed a kind of invincible trinity.
Perhaps the weakest link in the chain was Mastrangelo. Little was known about him. He lived alone in a nondescript apartment in Bensonhurst. He had never been seen with a woman—though not with a man, either. He had no children. He was a silent type; you never saw him shooting the breeze just for the sake of talking. If he said something, it was always about the job and what had to be done.
Mastrangelo was difficult to approach and appeared to be extremely loyal to those who placed their trust in him. He had never fought for any family in particular, preferring to work as a free agent.
Among the families, he was rumored to have accumulated immense wealth over the years. Mastrangelo spent only the bare amount necessary to live. He didn’t gamble, didn’t do drugs, didn’t visit whores. So not even money could be his weak point.
Roy Boccia, who was mulling over the situation with Bontade and Pizzuto, said, “You know something, Vito, I don’t buy all this virtue. Every one of us has a hidden skeleton in the closet. We just need to find out what his is, and we’ll have him in our grip.”
Pizzuto nodded. And so they decided, on the spot, to dig up Jack Mastrangelo’s secret.
For four whole weeks, Roy Boccia, alternating with seven other bloodhounds from the Bontade family, didn’t let him out of his sight. Boccia, a real expert in this type of operation, had divided the men into five daily shifts. The first four were four hours each, with the last one ending at ten o’clock at night. The overnight shift started at ten and ended at six the following morning. With such an undemanding schedule, they could go on for months that way.
Boccia knew from experience that once the second month rolled around, good news could come any day. So far, they’d accumulated a folder of reports a stack high, and Mastrangelo appeared to be the simple, unremarkable man that everyone described. But one day, a Sunday, Boccia’s prediction came true.
That day, Ben Eleazar and Aldo Martini, two of the family’s new recruits, were on duty. Eleazar was a Jew from Greece, and Martini came straight from Lombardy, near Milan. Jack Mastrangelo generally spent Sundays at home alone, stretched out on the couch listening to the radio or dozing. This Sunday, however, he got dressed and in the early afternoon drove off in his car. At first they thought he was headed to the airport, but he ended up in an exclusive area in Queens near the Whitestone Bridge. As Mastrangelo neared Francis Lewis Park, he slowed down, as if to make sure he wasn’t being followed.
At some distance behind him, Ben Eleazar told the Italian at the wheel to slow down. Traffic was minimal, and it would be difficult to go unnoticed. The area, with its magnificent homes surrounded by trees and manicured gardens, was evidently a refuge for the city’s upper middle class.
Ben and Aldo were excited at the prospect of having perhaps hit the jackpot. Boccia had promised a substantial cash bonus to whoever uncovered Mastrangelo’s secret.
Jack Mastrangelo stopped in front of one of the most imposing edifices, with a massive three-story central portion and two-story wings extending in a semicircle at either side, like welcoming arms. A garden with abundant flower beds, exotic trees, and a broad drive lined by ancient oaks lent the grounds an air of classical restraint.
A few nuns were busy caring for the garden. The lawn was meticulously tended, and the walkways were bordered by perfectly trimmed hedges. Aldo Martini noticed a crucifix and the statue of a saint near the gate.
Mastrangelo parked the car, entered the garden, and walked down the oak-lined drive that led to the main entrance. The massive door opened, and a nun came out, greeting him with a polite smile.
They saw Mastrangelo disappear inside the institution.
“So that’s his secret,” Ben said.
“Could it be a son or a daughter?” Aldo Martini wondered.
It was neither. Aurora was Jack Mastrangelo’s niece, the daughter of his sister, Elena, who had died thirteen years earlier, killed by her companion. Today was the girl’s twenty-first birthday. Unfortunately, she was unable to celebrate with a carefree party like others her age. A form of catatonia had struck her thirteen years ago, when she witnessed her mother’s murder.
The mother’s boyfriend, a hopeless alcoholic, had been home alone with the girl. She was only eight at the time. When Elena came home after her shift at the factory, she caught him raping the girl. He had one hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming while he touched and abused her vilely with his other hand. At the sight of that appalling scene, Elena rushed at him and smashed a pot of basil over his head. The man fell to the ground, unconscious, as the woman desperately embraced the child, her protection too late. The man regained consciousness,
however. His vision blurred by alcohol and the violent blow, he grabbed Elena by the neck and began tightening his grip, squeezing and jerking her brutally. The woman’s only concern was for the little girl: she continued to try shielding her, but by holding the child, she couldn’t defend herself. She died choked to death, her daughter gripped tightly in her arms. The girl kept shrieking, but by then her vocal cords were worn out, and only a muted sound came out of her mouth. The man felt the woman’s legs go limp and let her go. Elena fell on top of the child, who had stopped screaming. She had also stopped struggling. Aurora had ceased to exist. The long nighttime of her mind began that day.
“Catatonia,” the doctors pronounced. “It’s a psychiatric syndrome characterized by motor, emotional, and behavioral abnormalities, which may stem from both physical and psychic pathologies.”
That was the terse explanation they gave Mastrangelo. His sister’s lover was accorded the judgment of partial insanity, because he had committed the crimes while under the influence of alcohol. He was sentenced to eight years. When he was released from prison five years ago, he tracked down the girl at the institution and phoned to pay her a visit. Mastrangelo was notified by the nuns, however, and intercepted him before he reached his destination.
The two scars marring Mastrangelo’s face were a souvenir of their meeting. His sister’s boyfriend was never heard from again.
Elena had always asked her brother to look after the child if something were to happen to her. It seemed like a premonition.
Mastrangelo had promised her at their mother’s grave that he would never abandon Aurora, and that promise was for him an obsession.
He had willed all of his real estate holdings to his niece. And if something were to happen to him, the nuns, according to the will’s instructions, would receive a handsome annuity to continue caring for her for as long as she lived.
The Prince Page 40
