Havana Nocturne

by T. J. English

  The weekly meetings usually took place in the late afternoon, with Stassi presiding as a kind of go-between for the various parties in attendance. Everyone gathered in the library and sometimes they spilled out onto the veranda. Along with Meyer, and sometimes his brother, Jake, the participants included Trafficante, the Cellini brothers, Norman Rothman, and Wilbur Clark. Others in attendance were a collection of men—most with experience in the casino-gambling business—who filled out the lower ranks of the Havana Mob, including:

  Thomas “Blackjack” McGinty—Born and raised in Cleveland, McGinty was a former labor slugger, bootlegger, and proprietor of McGinty’s Saloon, one of the more renowned Mob joints in that city’s history. McGinty became an associate of Lansky through his connections to the old Mayfield Road Gang and since the 1930s had become involved in gambling operations in Youngstown, Ohio; Covington, Kentucky; and South Florida. He owned a piece of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas; in Havana, he was part owner of the gambling concession at the Hotel Nacional.

  Charles “The Blade” Tourine, alias Charles White—In Havana, Tourine was known as Charles White. A former New Jersey nightclub owner who later moved to Miami, he had served for years as a link between the legitimate business world and the Mob. White was brought to Cuba to serve as manager of a nightclub at the Capri Hotel, then under construction in the Vedado neighborhood.

  Nicholas “The Fat Butcher” di Costanzo—A mafioso with underworld connections from New Jersey to Miami, di Costanzo was known to have a volatile temper. He was summoned to Havana to serve as floor manager at the Capri’s casino. At six feet seven inches tall and corpulent, di Costanzo was an imposing figure, and he quickly made enemies in town through his public berating of employees and fellow mobsters.

  Joe Silesi, alias Joe Rivers—Rivers was a jack-of-all-trades for the Havana Mob. He was slated to serve in a managerial capacity at two new casinos, one at the Deauville Hotel and the other at the Hilton, both under construction. An associate of Trafficante, Rivers would become one of the most visible public faces of the Mob in Havana.

  William Bischoff, alias Lefty Clark—Tall and silver-haired, Clark was a veteran casino manager with links to Florida and Las Vegas. He ran the casino at the Sans Souci and would later take over operations at the Tropicana, where he initiated many “giveaways” and other promotional gimmicks to draw players to his gambling enterprises. Clark worked for both Lansky and Trafficante in Havana.

  Eddie Levinson—Brother of a famous gambler named Louis “Sleep Out” Levinson, Eddie ran gambling operations for the Mob in Covington, Kentucky, and also for the Lansky brothers in South Florida. He was a prominent member of what was sometimes referred to as “the Jewish Mafia,” a collection of mostly New York and Florida businessmen associated with Meyer Lansky’s gambling operations. Levinson arrived in Havana to serve as general manager of the casino at the Hotel Riviera.

  At the regular meetings at Joe Stassi’s place, there were no representatives from the Cuban government, nor Cuban-born mobsters like Amadeo Barletta or Amletto Battisti. These were gatherings solely for U.S. mobsters and their businessmen acolytes. Often these meetings centered on business and Mob-related developments back in the States that might affect operations in Havana, or vice versa.

  Armando Jaime was not a participant at these meetings. As Lansky’s driver, he usually stayed outside in the car or was allowed to run errands before returning to pick up his boss at a specified time. Sometimes others at the meetings reconvened in the backseat with Lansky to continue discussing issues important to the Havana Mob. While driving through the city, Jaime heard snippets of conversations between Lansky and the others. A specific name kept coming up: Anastasia.

  Jaime was familiar with the name Albert Anastasia. He’d been a student at Northwestern University during the time of the televised Kefauver hearings, when Anastasia was identified as the leader of a murderous Brooklyn-based Mob crew known as Murder Inc. Among the constellation of mobsters and mafiosi exposed during the hearings, Anastasia had emerged as one of the most sinister and terrifying.

  Through conversations Jaime overheard from the backseat of Lansky’s car, he got the impression that Anastasia was somehow becoming a problem for the Havana Mob. Although he didn’t know all the details, Jaime heard that it had something to do with Anastasia’s dissatisfaction with the division of spoils in Havana. Anastasia didn’t think he was getting his fair share and had apparently let his discontent be known. It was causing a ripple of concern among members of the Havana Mob.

  The most worried of all was Lansky. Meyer had a history with Albert Anastasia going back to the beginnings of his involvement with organized crime. Of the numerous mafiosi who could cause problems for the Jewish Mob boss in the underworld, Anastasia was tops on the list. He was a volatile figure, a killer par excellence, and a veteran mobster who had attended every major Mob summit meeting, including the one at the Hotel Nacional in December 1946. Anastasia was stubborn and unpredictable. If anyone could throw a wrench into the plans of the Havana Mob and ruin things for everyone, it was Anastasia, the quick-tempered thug who was sometimes referred to by friend and foe alike as “the Mad Hatter.”

  SO FAR, LANSKY HAD had it relatively easy in Havana. Since taking over as Batista’s gambling czar, he’d presided over a rapidly developing empire, dividing percentages and spreading the wealth with an eye toward peace and tranquillity within the ranks of the Mob. Representatives from New York, New Jersey, Miami, Tampa, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Las Vegas all received a piece of the action in Havana. Lansky was able to hold it all together and oversee the payouts with a minimum of discord—until Anastasia’s name came up.

  Anastasia was a tough, wide-shouldered man, 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing 210 pounds. He had the face of an undertaker—cold—with deep-set eyes and thick, curly black hair. In all the public photos of Anastasia—most of which were taken when he was going to or coming from a legal proceeding of some type—he is never seen smiling. He appeared to be a man who was carrying a heavy burden, an unpleasant man who would just as soon unburden himself through violence or the dispensation of abuse as through the niceties of everyday conversation. His temperament was no doubt partly determined by his role in the Syndicate. He was the chief assassin, the man most responsible for making bodies disappear. As an investigator for the Kefauver Committee put it: “Mr. Albert Anastasia has a lot of skeletons in his closet.”

  For the most part, Anastasia was a loyalist, and he loved Charlie Luciano. He’d got his start in the Mob with Charlie Lucky and was believed to have been one of the gunmen—along with Vito Genovese—in the 1931 murder of Joe “the Boss” Masseria. That murder had helped pave the way for Luciano and Lansky to form the Commission, which launched a new era of organized crime in the United States. Anastasia rightly believed he was a founding father. He was rewarded by being allowed to control—along with his brother Anthony “Tough Tony” Anastasio—an underworld empire on the docks of Brooklyn that was highly lucrative, especially in the years before, during, and immediately after the Second World War.

  The story of the Anastasia brothers is like a Mafia fairy tale, a classic up-by-the-bootstraps, Italy-to-Brooklyn mobster parable. Albert was born Umberto Anastasio in 1902 in Tropea, a fishing village in the province of Calabria. His father was a railroad worker who died sometime before the First World War. By the time the father passed on, the family had grown to include nine sons and three daughters. One son and two daughters died young. Another son emigrated to Australia. All the sons had to go to work at a young age on farms, the railroad, fishing boats, and freighters.

  From the age of eleven or twelve, Umberto and his brother Tony shipped as deckhands on tramp steamers and knocked around some of the toughest ports in the world. In 1917 they jumped ship in Brooklyn and settled in a cold-water flat near the waterfront. Umberto Anastasio changed his name to Albert Anastasia, though Tony kept Anastasio as his appellation.

  It didn’t take Albert long to
get into trouble. In 1921, at the age of nineteen, he was convicted along with another man for the murder of an Italian longshoreman. Anastasia was given the death penalty and sent to Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York. After eighteen months on death row, he was awarded a new trial on a legal technicality. Meanwhile, two witnesses whose testimony had doomed Anastasia at the first trial wound up dead and another was frightened back to Italy. The charge that had taken Albert to within a few months of execution was now dropped. He was a free man.

  Still in his early twenties, Anastasia returned to Brooklyn and picked up where he’d left off. He formed an alliance with Luciano, whom he viewed as a kind of Sicilian prince. Luciano returned the affection. “You know, Charlie,” Albert once told Lucky, “I’ll betcha I’m the only loudmouthed bum you really like.”

  Anastasia had a hair-trigger temper and he didn’t seem to mind killing. In fact, he seemed to like it. Albert would kill first and ask questions later. He jumped at the chance to serve Luciano by taking part in the all-important execution of Joe the Boss at Scarpato’s Italian Restaurant on West 15th Street in Coney Island. Later, along with a Brooklyn Jew named Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, he became head of the enforcement arm of the Mob, which the press was later to name Murder Inc.

  Nobody had heard of Murder Inc. or anything like it until 1940, when New York cops arrested Abe “Kid Twist” Reles on a homicide charge. A weaselly and talkative professional thug from Brooklyn, Reles began to spill the beans on a staggering number of murders carried out by a well-organized hit squad of Italian and Jewish killers. They met to plan their murders at Midnight Rose’s, a candy store under the elevated subway tracks in Brownsville. This group, claimed Reles, had traveled around the United States during the dust-bowl years of the Great Depression—from New England to California, Minnesota to New Orleans and Miami—and carried out hundreds of contract murders. The leader of the group was Anastasia. As the Brooklyn D.A.’s office put it: “No Mob murder is committed in Brooklyn without Anastasia’s permission and approval.” Kid Twist Reles said of Anastasia: “He is the law.”

  Murder Inc. was something new: a murder squad that conducted out-of-town hits as well as local jobs. They used every technique imaginable: shooting, knifing, garroting, burying alive, bombing, poison, torture, and asphyxiation. The average price for a job was twenty-five thousand dollars, a substantial fee during the lean years of the Depression. The entire enterprise was highly secretive—the definition of an underworld operation—and would likely have continued to be were it not for the loose lips of Abe Reles.

  In the lexicon of the Mob, Kid Twist was a “canary” who “sang like a bird.” Before he was done singing to prosecutors, Reles had given details on some two hundred murders he had personally participated in or had intimate knowledge of, leading to forty-nine prosecutions. Several top killers went to the electric chair, including the murderous Louis Lepke.

  By November 1941, Abe Reles was still giving information and building cases for the Brooklyn D.A.’s office. Next in line to be prosecuted was Albert Anastasia. The D.A.’s office announced that they were on the cusp of “the perfect case” against the feared boss of Murder Inc.

  The most prized informer in the history of organized crime was being held in a room at the Half Moon Hotel, on the boardwalk in Coney Island. He was guarded round the clock by a contingent of six cops, proud members of New York’s Finest. Somehow, Reles took the plunge. The cops said they didn’t know how it happened. They were dozing off when Reles tried to escape and “fell” six stories to his death. Or maybe he tried to commit suicide. Forever after, some in the press and public believed that cops had been paid off and were part of the hit. Reles’s demise led to one of the more famous epitaphs in Mob history: “He could sing but he couldn’t fly.”

  Anastasia escaped prosecution. In 1943 he surprised prosecutors, cops, and even his friends by enlisting in the U.S. Army. According to Lansky loyalist Doc Stacher, it was Meyer’s idea. Albert’s enlistment in the army would increase his chances of obtaining U.S. citizenship and make it harder for investigators and the press to impugn his integrity down the road. Anastasia became a sergeant. His assignment was to train military longshoremen at a base in Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. In 1944 he was honorably discharged when it was discovered that he was overage.

  By the time of the Kefauver hearings, Anastasia was a legend in his own time. He claimed to be a humble dress manufacturer. The fact that he’d recently moved into a massive home on a bluff in Palisades, New Jersey, with a spectacular view of the Hudson River, led many on the committee to question his employment history.

  “Between 1919 and 1942, can you tell the committee of any occupation you had?” asked one senator.

  “I don’t remember,” answered Anastasia.

  “Well, did you have any legitimate business or occupation between 1919 and 1942?”

  “I refuse to answer on the ground it might tend to incriminate me.”

  The committee pressed Anastasia on the subject; he dodged and parried in a manner that even had some on the committee chuckling. “In those years,” offered Albert, “I went down to the racetrack, and I would make a little bet and get a winner now and then, and get a loser. That is the way I used to do.”

  The highly public nature of the Kefauver hearings led many mobsters to go into hiding or retrenchment, but not Anastasia. He seemed to revel in his increased notoriety. In 1951, while the hearings were still under way, an explosive book was published entitled Murder Inc.: The Story of the Syndicate, cowritten by Burton B. Turkus, a former assistant D.A. from Brooklyn who handled many of the Murder Inc. prosecutions. Turkus identified Anastasia as “the one who got away,” writing, “this hard-mouthed, curly haired hoodlum has been close to some thirty assassinations with gun and ice pick and strangling rope, either in person or by direction…The killings claimed by the torpedoes of the troop he commanded ran well into three figures.”

  Anastasia had been outed as a major mobster, but it did not cramp his style. In fact, before the hearings were even finished, he started having people whacked. In April 1951, with Murder Inc. still on bookshelves everywhere, Albert arranged for the murders of Philip and Vincent Mangano, the brothers who headed the crime family of which he was a member. Anastasia had a long-running feud with Vincent Mangano, which had deteriorated to the point where they nearly came to blows on several occasions and had to be separated.

  Philip Mangano was the first to go. He was shot symmetrically in each cheek and in the back of his head, his body found in the wetlands of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, fully dressed except for his pants. Around the same time, Vincent Mangano was reported missing; his body was never found.

  Anastasia never admitted to having anything to do with the Mangano murders, though he was quick to point out that Vincent Mangano had put out a contract on him before he disappeared. Apparently, the Mad Hatter had neglected to clear these killings with the Commission, which protocol required of all Mob bosses. Anastasia’s actions created a hornet’s nest of resentment and hostility that would have reverberations throughout the American underworld for the next eight years.

  Meyer Lansky had always tried to keep his distance from Anastasia. There was a degree of hypocrisy in his aversion to the notorious Mafia thug. Many times in his career Lansky had benefited from the Mob’s homicidal tendencies. From the murder of Joe the Boss onward, Anastasia had arranged for the elimination of many Lansky competitors, and he had provided the muscle that gave the Mob its fearsome reputation. In later years, Lansky often voiced the belief that he was as much a legitimate businessman as anybody else, but in truth he had achieved his stature in the world of high finance thanks in part to men like Albert Anastasia. The Mob’s reputation for violence gave Lansky an edge in his business dealings. He reaped the rewards of fear instilled by the likes of Murder Inc.

  By the early 1950s, Lansky liked to think that he had outgrown gangsters like Anastasia. Albert was everything that he was not: impulsive, hotheaded, cru
de, brazen. His audacity knew no bounds. The murder of the Mangano brothers had at least been business related, a consequence of underworld maneuverings for control, which was more than could be said for the murder of Arnold Schuster.

  Schuster was an ordinary citizen, a person with no criminal record or attachment to the underworld in any way. One night in 1952, Anastasia was sitting in his mansion in New Jersey watching television when he saw an interview with Arnold Schuster, who described his experience as an eyewitness against famed bank robber Willie Sutton. Schuster was presented with a watch as a good citizen award. Anastasia became enraged, shouting at the TV, “I can’t stand squealers. I want him dead.” Albert didn’t even know Willie Sutton, but he put together a hit team and arranged for the murder of Arnold Schuster.

  On March 8, 1952, Schuster was shot dead on a Brooklyn street near his house. The murder touched off a firestorm in the press, with the public outraged at the brutal killing of this good citizen. The heat caused problems for Anastasia among his mobster associates, but he didn’t seem to care. The Mad Hatter had his own way of dealing with such matters. When the gun used in the hit was traced to a hood named Freddie Tenuto—the man Anastasia had contracted to murder Schuster—Albert simply had Tenuto murdered. The body was never found.

  The removal of human beings from the corporeal world was a way of life for Anastasia. Years later, Mafia turncoat Joseph Valachi remembered: “With [Anastasia] it was always kill, kill, kill. If somebody came up and told Albert something bad about somebody else, he would say, ‘Hit him. Hit him!’”

  Throughout the mid-1950s, while Lansky was down in Cuba building a gambling empire for the Mob, Anastasia was in his walled fortress in New Jersey plotting murders.

  In November 1955, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service tried Albert on charges of income-tax evasion. A five-week trial ended in a hung jury; a second trial was scheduled for 1956. Charles Ferri, a sixty-eight-year-old plumbing contractor from Fort Lee, New Jersey, who had collected eighty-seven hundred dollars for work he performed on Anastasia’s mansion, was expected to be a key witness. In May, about a month before the trial, Ferri and his wife disappeared from their home in a Miami suburb. According to an FBI report: “The Ferri residence in Miami was a shambles, with blood found on the living room, bedroom and bathroom floors, in addition to the hallway. There was also found a large pool of blood beside Mrs. Ferri’s bed.” The messy crime scene yielded no bodies and none were ever found. Not long after that, the body of Vincent Macri, an associate of Anastasia, was found shot up and stuffed in the trunk of a car in the Bronx. A few days later, Vincent’s brother, Benedicto, turned up missing, his body supposedly dumped in the Passaic River. The murders of the two Ferris and two Macris were seen as part of a plot to eliminate all possible witnesses against Anastasia. The IRS case against him was in tatters. Albert entered a plea of guilty on two counts of tax evasion and wound up serving less than twelve months at a federal prison in Michigan.