Philip Rubenstein
The Crime Families of New York
Philip Rubenstein - The Crime Families of New York
- Hello, everyone. Welcome. It’s a chilly, chilly evening in London on this January evening. So welcome. Just a word of slight warning, which is this is a big subject, and I have tried to cut it down as much as possible, but in my enthusiasm, it is possible. In fact, it’s very possible that we may go slightly over time. So as I say, just a quick word of warning. Right, well, this is the story of the American Mafia, also known as the Mob, also known as the Cosa Nostra, Our Thing. And it’s from the very first seeds at the turn of the 20th century to the present day. The Mafia’s reach was coast to coast, north to south. But the epicentre of its operation, the home of the so-called Five Families, is New York, and so the focus of our story is going to be the New York story. What today won’t be is the story of the Jewish Mob, the Jewish gangsters, and that’s because that’s already been the subject of two really excellent lectures. I hope some of you will remember that Sandra Myers gave back in August of last year.
So we’ll touch on some of the colourful characters that Sandra talked about, but if you want to know that story, if you missed it, please, please do check it out, Sandra’s lectures. They were called, there were two lectures, the Kosher Nostra part one and part two, on the Lockdown website. Right, so we’re going to start with the elephant in the room, and the elephant in the room, the big problem when we talk about the Mafia is that it’s very easy to slip into romanticising and glorifying, and I know I’m as guilty as the next person of doing this. Why do we do it? Well, it’s the glamour of the lifestyle, for one. The suits, the codes of honour. Above all, the association with family. I mean, this is the opening scene of the first Godfather movie, and it’s a wedding scene. Then there’s the larger than life characters, people like Arnold Rothstein or Arnold Rothstein, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Joe Bonanno, Albert Anastasia, Frank Costello, and even John Gotti. There’s the incredibly colourful language they use, the way they talk. Words like wise guys, button men, captains, consiglieres, make your bones, scams, shakedowns, goomahs, rubouts, whackings. It goes on.
There’s the nicknames. I mean, every self-respecting mobster seems to have a nickname. Bugsy, Joe Bananas, The Bull, The Chin, The Nose, The Cigar, The Horse, The Wolf, The Clutch-Hand, Three Fingers, Louie Bagels, Benny Eggs, Benny Squint. And, of course, if you’re called Tony, and there are a lot of Tonys, then you definitely have to have a nickname. Tony Pro, Tony Green, Tony Jack, Tony Gaspipe, Fat Tony, Tough Tony. There’s even a Tony Ducks. Books like Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather” sold us on an idea, and the idea was, okay, they kill, but mobsters also care about their community, and they live by their own decent codes of honour and conduct. They’re impervious to the hypocrisies of the establishment. Just look how we romanticise them on the screen. The movies, “The Godfather,” parts one and part two, “Goodfellas,” “Once Upon a Time in America,” “Donnie Brasco,” and it just goes on. And, of course, there’s that great invention for television as well, “The Sopranos.”
So it’s very easy to be seduced by these characters and by the stories, and as I say, I’m as much of a sucker for it as anyone else. So my aim today, my real objective is to tell this extraordinary story, but to do it in such a way of staying grounded and remembering who these people are and what they’re really doing for a living. The origins of the Mafia. The story itself doesn’t begin in Gotham City, The City That Never Sleeps. It begins some four and a half thousand miles due east on the island of Sicily. For 2,000 years, really until the middle of the 19th century, Sicily’s population endured tyranny and suppression under a series of, a rolling series of foreign conquerors and feudal overlords. I mean, just look on the map where it is. It’s right in the middle of the Mediterranean. It’s close to Southern Italy and North Africa. So this is a highly strategic spot. It hasn’t got much in the way of natural defences, so that also makes it highly vulnerable to invasion. And, I mean, the invasions were just never-ending. The Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Etruscans, Carthaginians, Romans, Normans, Arabs, French, Spanish, and finally, the Italians themselves after the unification of Italy.
Sicilians survived these occupations by developing a culture that’s rooted really in two basic ideas. The first one is a kind of contempt for and suspicion of any governmental authority, and the second one is tight-knit alliances with blood relatives and fellow countrymen so that they can face the same perils together. And over time, this culture spawns a number of secretive clans, and they develop their own system for justice and for retribution. And they survive by demanding an oath of silence from their members. This is the omerta, the promise never to tell the authorities anything. No one quite knows where the name mafia, mafiosi comes from. It seems to have been a Sicilian-Arabic slang expression that means protector against the arrogance of the powerful. But it enters into popular use from the 1860s, and that’s a result of this play, “I mafiusi de la Vicaria,” which roughly translates to heroes of the penitentiary. The play is about a valiant group of inmates in a Sicilian prison who maintain their own hierarchy and their own rituals in spite of their oppressive surroundings. The play toured Italy, and suddenly the word mafiosi just seems to catch on.
These are also the years, this is the 1860s, when Sicily becomes a province of the recently unified Italy following Garibaldi’s successful efforts. But whatever state building is happening on the Italian mainland, for Sicily, the 1860s proves to be a time of total chaos, disorder, and rampant crime. And so when the Sicilian Mafia offers Rome to help clean the place up, Roman officials decide effectively to turn a blind eye to their activities. In other words, the Mafia is given free rein to entrench and expand itself across the whole island for the next 50 years, and it’s only in the 1920s that their power is curbed. That’s when the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini assumes control. He launches a brutal crackdown against the organisation. Why? Well, as far as Il Duce is concerned, the Mafia represents a threat to his absolute authority, and it’s a threat he’s going to crush by any means. So you may ask, what has all this to do with America? The first emergence of what became the Mafia in the USA can be dated to the same period around the 1860s, but it’s to New Orleans, not to New York. One writer has called New Orleans the Casa Nostra’s Plymouth Rock, and that’s because New Orleans was one of the first American ports of call for new Sicilian and Southern Italian immigrants.
They arrived on ships that were called lemon boats rather disparagingly, and that’s because the vessels carried citrus fruits as well as passengers from Italy. Let’s just say, and, of course, this goes for the whole of the Italian population throughout, the vast majority of those immigrants arriving from Sicily and Italy, the vast majority are individuals and families who are seeking to escape poverty. But secreted among their numbers were a number of thugs and gangsters, and it wasn’t long in New Orleans before two violent Sicilian gangs were fighting each other in the ports for control of the stevedoring business. This, though, was a foreboding only because the real trouble was to come later in the 1920s, and it was all the result of Mussolini’s onslaught against the Sicilian Mafia. Under Il Duce, more than 1,200 mafiosi were convicted and sentenced. Many were held in cages, they were sent away for life, or they were shot, or they were killed by some other means.
And so effective is this crackdown that those who managed to evade capture scramble to leave the island as quick as they can. And where do they go? Well, they make for American shores. And it’s not to New Orleans that they gravitate. It’s to the northern cities, and in particular, it’s to New York. In the streets of Little Italy, they find easy prey among their own countrymen, new immigrants who are vulnerable and who were adapting to a different language and different customs, and, of course, they’re also apprehensive of the authorities. The trouble begins with La Mano Nera, translated as The Black Hand. The Black Hand wasn’t an organisation as such. It was a name that was given to a method of extortion, but it was used by lots of small-time hoods and local gangs. And this went on for a good 20 years or so. But things were stirring, and new players were emerging, and the American Mafia was very soon about to come into its own. If you have to single out one figure who’s responsible more than anyone for the shape and structure of the modern-day Mafia, Mafia as it is today, well, I think that figure would have to be Charlie Lucky Luciano.
He’s one of five children, and his family immigrated from Sicily to New York to the Lower East Side when he was eight years old. He was never, never going to have a conventional life. At the age of 14, he drops out of school and starts to deliver hats. But he then wins $200 in a dice game, and that’s it. He quits his job, and he begins earning money on the street. As a teenager, he becomes a member of the infamous Five Points Gang, and their alumni include some of the biggest names, the biggest villains over the next 20-30 years. They include Al Capone, they include Frank Costello, and they include Vito Genovese. He decides to form his own gang. But unlike other street gangs whose business was usually petty crime, Luciano sees an opportunity, and he decides to offer protection to Jewish kids for 10 cents a week to protect them from the local Italian and Irish gangs.
Well, one day he tries to extort money from a scrawny Jewish kid on his way home from school, and the kid unusually is defiant and refuses to give him the money. So the kid takes a beating, but he still refuses. Luciano can’t help respecting him. The kid’s name is Meyer Lansky, and the two form a lifelong friendship and business partnership after that moment. 1920 is a big year for Charlie Lucky Luciano. He’s already befriended a number of what will be Mafia leaders, including Genevese and including Frank Costello, through the Five Points Gang. But this is the year when he’s recruited by one of the big bosses in New York, Joe Masseria, to be a gunman for him. Luciano, Lansky, and their friends also start working for Arnold Rothstein. Now Rothstein, who’s pictured at the top there, Rothstein at the time was the most respected Jewish mobster. He was sophisticated, and he was a big time gambler who was known to have fixed the 1919 World Series. So he had much kudos as a result. And Rothstein becomes a mentor to Luciano. He sees talent there, and he teaches him how to dress well and how to move in high society. Where the association with Rothstein really pays off though is the opportunity to make a fortune from a dry America in the Prohibition years.
Because Prohibition is imposed from, as we all know, January 1920, lasts for 13 years, and it’s there until it’s repealed in 1933. Rothstein educates Luciano and his friends on how to turn bootlegging into a lucrative business, which is financed, of course, by one Arnold Rothstein. And before long, they’re making money hand over fist. In the Prohibition years, the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages was illegal, but be that as it may, the public’s demand for alcohol never abated, and the opportunities supplying booze to a clientele that was generally law-abiding, but extremely thirsty provides criminals with a source of immense profits. Combined with Mussolini’s crackdown on the Sicilian Mafia, Prohibition transforms what had been a small group or small-time group of hoods and hoodlums into the preeminent criminal organisation in America. What changes these small-time outfits, be they Italian or Jewish or Irish, is that now they have to develop highly sophisticated organisations to handle everything, from manufacturing and importing to warehousing and distribution. Suddenly they have to learn logistics. They have to learn profit and loss accounts. So instead of just street thugs, they’re now operating more akin to business executives.
In 1924, one of the hundreds of Sicilians who sneak their way illegally into the US at this time is the 19-year-old Joseph Bonanno, who would later be known as Joe Bananas. Bonanno is going, in a few years’ time, to create his own mob empire in America, but right now he’s making his way to Brooklyn, to Williamsburg. And it’s there that he joins a gang from his hometown, Castellammare del Golfo, which is in the northeast of, sorry, the northwest of Sicily. He’s astonished by the immense profits to be made from Prohibition. In his memoirs, which aren’t always reliable, I have to say, he writes, “When I first got into bootlegging, I just thought it was too good to be true,” and he describes Prohibition as the golden goose. Prohibition did wonders for the romantic, the image of the Mob. Officials, judges, the police, they’re all more than willing to turn a blind eye to bootlegging, either because they’re doing it, they’re going to speakeasies themselves or they’re being paid off. And bizarrely, because Prohibition was so unpopular, the men who stood up to it were heralded not as criminals, but more as heroes.
These were the guys who were thumbing their noses at a bad law and at the establishment. Good for them. Hollywood does its part, of course, to promote the myth as well. In 1931 and 1932, we saw the first classic gangster movies. “Little Caesar,” which made a name for Edward G. Robinson, “Scarface” with Paul Muni, and the first of them, “Public Enemy,” starring James Cagney. All three films chronicle the quick rise and fall of a young and vicious criminal. Though the gangster in each movie would face a violent downfall, as they had to to remind viewers of the consequences of crime, audience tended to identify with these kind of charismatic anti-heroes, a kid who’s worked hard to escape the poverty of Depression-era America. Even in “Public Enemy,” we can’t help but be attracted to Cagney even when he’s at his vilest and cruellest. Here he is in one of the great Hollywood iconic moments, where he mashes a grapefruit into his poor girlfriend’s face.
Video clip plays.
It’s all ready, Tom.
Ain’t you got a drink in the house?
Well, not before breakfast, dear.
I didn’t ask you for any lip. I asked you if you had a drink.
I know, Tom, but… Well, gee, I-I wish that-
There you go with that wishing stuff again. I wish you was a wishing well, so that I could tie a bucket to you and sink it.
Maybe you found someone you like better.
Ooh.
Video clip ends.
- By the way, the story is that the two of them did the scene for a joke, and it was never intended to be kept in, but the director decided to keep it in. Everyone remembers Cagney in that scene, but to our shame, none of us ever remember the name of the actress who plays the girlfriend. So I’m just going to say it now just so we all do remember. Her name is Mae Clarke. With all this money sloshing around in Prohibition, it will come as no surprise at all that there was a great deal of infighting among the mobs, among the Mob in the 1920s. The two biggest bosses at the time were Joe Masseria, who was employing Luciano at the time, and his rival, Salvatore Maranzano. After repeated clashes between their two factions, it became increasingly clear that they were going to be clashing constantly for the leadership of the Mafia, and so war was declared. Outwardly this war, which was known as the Castellammarese War because that’s where the Masseria faction came from.
Outwardly, the war was between the forces of Masseria and Maranzano. But beneath the surface, there was also a generational conflict between the old guard, the two of them, and their followers, who were known as the Moustache Petes for their long moustaches, which obviously those two didn’t have, and their old world ways, and the new, a younger group, men like Charlie Lucky, who were more forward thinking and were more open to new ways of operating, such as working with non-Italians. In 1931, Charlie Lucky Luciano made the momentous decision to betray his boss Masseria and switch sides. And in return for engineering Masseria’s death, Maranzano rewarded him with Masseria’s rackets and made him his own second-in-command. With Masseria gone, Maranzano was able to reorganise the Italian American gangs into Five Families, and these are the Five New York Families that are still with us today. Maranzano also reshaped the structure of the modern-day Mafia family.
And so here it is, and this is probably recognisable to most of us. So let’s have a look at this chart. At the very top, we find the don, and under him is the second-in-command, the underboss. And then alongside, we have the family consigliere. The consigliere is like an advisor or a counsellor. And underneath are the capos, also known as the captains, and each of the captains has a crew. And to become a soldier in this crew, you have to take the oath of loyalty. So these soldiers are also called made men, and to become a soldier is to make your bones. That’s the expression that’s used. And underneath the soldiers, you have legions of associates. This chart is slightly misleading. It looks like there’s two soldiers for every one associate, but actually it’s quite different. For every soldier, typically, you might find somewhere between half a dozen and ten associates.
The associates are either Italians who dream of one day making their bones themselves, or they’re non-Italians, who will always remain associates, because non-Italians, or in most families, non-Sicilians aren’t able to become fully-fledged family members. Well, all was going reasonably well, but then Maranzano decides to call a meeting of the bosses. And at this meeting, he declares himself the Capo di Tutti Capi, the boss of all bosses. Luciano watches this happen, and he starts to get worried. And ‘cause the more he’s getting to know Maranzano, the more he starts to feel that this man is just as greedy and just as hidebound as his old boss Masseria. It’s probable, we don’t know for sure. It’s probable that Luciano never actually planned to kill Maranzano in the first place. But when he hears that Maranzano is getting suspicious of him and has hired a hitman to kill him, he decides to act first. Over several dates in September 1931, Maranzano, his loyal lieutenants, and a few other threats are all dispatched, leaving Charlie Lucky Luciano the last man standing.
In the months that follow, Luciano proves himself to be one of the great organisation geniuses. His major innovation is to abolish once and for all the whole concept of boss of bosses and to replace it with a body that was known as the Commission. The Commission would serve as the governing body for organised crime. In effect, it became the Mafia’s board of directors. All the major families were given a seat on the Commission, but it was understood by everyone that the Five New York Families would always be the most influential members and would have the last say. The purpose of the Commission was to ensure that there were going to be no more wars. So if two families have a dispute, you go to the Commission to solve it. If you want to get into a risky new business, for example, you go to the Commission for permission. Most important of all, the Commission would prove, would provide the Mafia with continuity. So if something should happen to a boss, as it often did, a new boss would be appointed to take over, and they would get the seat on the Commission.
So this way, whatever happens to any one individual, the system will always bounce back. The system will always survive. It was simple and brilliant. There’s a side question that sometimes pops up at this stage, which is why the Jewish gangsters never organise themselves in the same way. This is how the Sicilians organised themselves for longevity. Why didn’t the Jews do it? And the answer is that the Sicilians and the Jews had a very different outlook from each other. The Sicilians were creating a dynastic business. They were building something that could last and could be passed on from one generation to the next. The Jews, however, saw things very differently. Crime was their ticket out of poverty, and once they were out, the family was never going back. The Jewish gangsters, almost to a man, were adamant that neither their children nor their grandchildren would ever follow their path.
For them, this was a strictly one-generational deal. So, the Commission is set up. Prohibition is over. It’s 1933. All good things must come to an end. Prohibition is repealed, and the Five New York Families could look back on those years, having profited handsomely from them, and have risen from a small, a group of small bands of hoods to criminal empires. But if they were to survive and flourish in this new world, they’d need to diversify. And diversify they did. Over the next 50 years, the Mafia’s activities expanded hugely through a combination of loan sharking, extortion, narcotics, prostitution, robberies, fencing, cargo hijackings, and gambling. And before long, the word racket had become the popular name to describe these various Mafia activities. This is the period from the 1930s to really the end of the 1970s when organised crime becomes organised. Ralph Salerno was a legendary former detective, New York detective, and he spent more than 20 years investigating the Mob from the mid-'50s onwards. In his day, Ralph Salerno knew more about the Mafia in America than anybody not sworn into it, and this is his definition of organised crime.
And I’m going to read it out because I think it’s important. “A self-perpetuating, continuing criminal conspiracy for profit and power, using fear and corruption in seeking immunity from the law.” I think that’s a very powerful description of what the Mafia is and what organised crime has become. Prohibition had been the management training ground for a new generation of leaders who took over from the Moustache Petes. And now they had a Commission that dominated all this criminal activity, and it allowed them to buy off the cops, buy off judges, political officials, and certainly in New York, control politics through Tammany Hall. This goes on for 50 years, 50 years virtually unchecked. Some of the Mafia lines of business were an expansion of what they’d done before, things like loan sharking and extortion, while others were brand new. One of the new areas was labour racketeering through control of the unions. The Mob decides to infiltrate several labour unions, most notoriously the Teamsters, but construction unions, longshoremen, and a number of others as well. And in most cases, what do they do? They raid the union’s health and pension funds, and they extort businesses with threats of a workers strike, and, of course, they rig any competitive bid for projects.
At the docks, they’re tipped off on a regular basis when valuable cargo is being brought in, and they steal the cargo, and then they fence the stolen merchandise. In New York City, they start to make inroads into legitimate businesses, construction, demolition, waste management, trucking, stevedoring, and the garment industry. In short, the Mafia were into everything, everything where there was money to be made. And by everything, by everything, I mean everything. I mean, they even ran the city’s kosher poultry business. The Lucchese family muscled their way into this $50 million a year business, kosher chickens, in the 1930s. Previously, it had been the exclusive domain of Jewish gangsters, and they’d melt the business with, you know, good old-fashioned shakedowns. But now the Sicilians moved in, and they turned the business into a cartel where everyone was forced to join, where prices were fixed, competition was ended, and, of course, the Luccheses profited handsomely from the whole deal.
So kosher poultry brings us to the Jewish contribution to the Mob’s rise. Aside from the Meyer Lanskys and the Arnold Rothsteins of this world, who were at the business end, an organisation was spawned by mainly Jewish gangsters, and it was led by Lepke Buchalter, who you can see in one of the photos here. And it was created for the single purpose of carrying out contract killings for the Mob. A reporter dubbed this organisation Murder Incorporated, and the name just stuck. Lepke was joined by characters such as Abe Reles, Farvel Cohen, Tootsie Feinstein, and Samuel Red Levine, red because of the colour of his hair. Red Levine has a- Well, he has a kind of a peculiar appeal because his one stipulation was that he’d never do a job over Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, the Jewish high holy days. It’s tempting to mythologize these guys. Rich Cohen has an excellent book about them. It’s called “Tough Jews.” It’s a great read if you get an opportunity. But lest we forget, they were brutal murderers.
Lepke, for example, had a reputation for gruesome touches to his jobs and for enjoying his work a little too much. No one knows the precise number, but it’s believed that they were responsible for somewhere in the region and possibly more than a hundred murders in their day. So as I mentioned before, by the way, if you want to know more about the Jewish gangsters, please do watch Sandra Myers’s lectures, the Kosher Nostra, on lockdownuniversity.org. I mentioned Meyer Lansky a couple of times, and one of his contributions is that he helped his great friend, Ben Bugsy Siegel, to open up Las Vegas to becoming, well, what it is today, which is the gambling centre of the world. Vegas was, it was really Bugsy’s vision, and he was the one who opened the very first gambling resort there, which is shown in the picture, which is the Flamingo. Once the state of Nevada had legalised gambling, Vegas just became, it became seen as an open city where any Mafia family could build or invest.
And from the '40s onwards, the 1940s onwards, Mafia families from all over the country piled in. Many of the hotels were bought with loans from the Teamsters’ pension fund, which, of course, the Mob effectively controlled. The place where, if you like, the Mafia magic happened in the casinos was in the counting room. When money came into the counting room every day, the mobsman would sit there, watch the count, and then skim off the cash before it was recorded. Then they deliver it to their bosses back in New York or Milwaukee or Chicago or wherever. For Lansky and for the Mafia, an even greater prize in the 1950s was Havana. Because here was a government that didn’t just turn a blind eye, which is what Nevada was effectively doing. It cooperated fully with the Mob, legalised all of its activities, and entered into a partnership with it, a business partnership. Havana was Meyer Lansky’s brainchild.
In the 1940s, he had a private meeting in New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel with Batista, who was the Cuban dictator. And in that meeting, he agreed a deal where Havana would be opened up to large-scale gambling, which the Mafia would then control in partnership with the Cuban government and making sure that there were plenty of kickbacks for everyone. Even sweeter for Meyer Lansky, his old pal Charlie Lucky Luciano, who by now was in prison, had managed to find his way to get deported to Italy, and now he secretly escaped and came back and moved secretly to Cuba, where he ran a number of the casinos himself. So the old group was back together. Cuba was brilliant and it made the Mob tonnes of money, but it only lasted until 1959 because, of course, that’s when Fidel Castro happened to lead the overthrow of the Batista regime. So that was the end of that, but it was good while it lasted for the Mafia. One of the big lies that the Mafia tried to put out about itself is that they stayed well away from narcotics, from drugs trafficking. None of this was true, of course. I mean, they were certainly at first wary of the trade. That much is probably true, particularly in the 1950s.
The mid-‘50s is when there were tough new laws that were introduced, which carried a heavy mandatory sentence. So the fear was that if any hood was caught smuggling narcotics, that they might be induced to turn informant, to turn rat on their former amici. But the opportunity to make vast amounts of money was in the end just too tempting. From the late 1950s onwards, the Mob was in partnership with their Sicilian counterparts to import huge amounts of heroin into the United States. They took over a large concentration of restaurants in New York and other cities, which provided the perfect cover to smuggle billions of dollars’ worth of heroin, often hiding the cargo in various food products. Who do they target? Well, it was largely poor working-class neighbourhoods because, cynically, they believed this is where they’d achieve the best volumes of sales, and they were right. In the decades that followed, the Mob inundated America with the drug. So much so that by the middle of the 1970s, over 500,000 Americans, half a million Americans were hooked on heroin.
The impact on American cities, you know, and we all remember this. The impact was horrific. Crime rates skyrocketed. Rival street gangs staged gun battles, often killing innocent bystanders in the process. And large swathes of inner-city neighbourhoods were ravaged. So how big was the Mafia at its height? Well, in 1962, Meyer Lansky was at home watching a TV quiz show with his wife, and a panellist on the show happened to remark on the size of organised crime. Lansky was watching with his wife, and unbeknownst to him, his comments were picked up by a bug. He turned around to his wife and he quipped, “We’re bigger than US Steel.” Now any fans of “The Godfather” will know that this comment was later immortalised in “Godfather Part II” by Hyman Roth, who’s here played by Lee Strasberg. And Hyman Roth was the, was a barely disguised Meyer Lansky figure. The interesting thing, though, about the comment is that if anything, Lansky was actually understating the case. A confidential Justice Department report in the mid-1960s conservatively estimated, so this is a conservative estimate, that the profits made by organised crime were the equal of the 10 largest American corporations combined. So this is a very big business.
Let’s ask the, I think, obvious question, which is 50 years of stealing, plundering, intimidating, murdering, virtually unchecked. Where is law enforcement in all of this? Where’s Congress, the police, the FBI, the courts? Where are they? I mean, what’s extraordinary about this story and about the America at this time is that the Mafia’s ability to bribe and intimidate public officials, business leaders, witnesses and juries, and law enforcement agencies gave them an immunity, pretty much a free rein to operate. And if anyone did want to get them, no one even knew how to do it because there were no legal tools to go after the hierarchy, the big bosses. What’d you get them on? They never pulled the trigger. They never were seen to beat anyone up. They gave all their orders carefully through relays. So how would you even go after them. If there’s one man to blame for the lackadaisical attitude of law enforcement, and I think there is, it’s our old friend J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, well, why didn’t he do it?
For one thing, he liked to win, and he always felt that tackling the Mafia was, it went in the box that was called too hard. His agents were mainly rural boys from the South and Midwest who would have no clue how to actually infiltrate the Mob. And he was also worried about bribery. He worried that FBI agents would be as susceptible as local cops clearly had been to bribery. Now there’s also a theory that Meyer Lansky had something on him, that Meyer Lansky had evidence, pictures of Hoover with his boyfriend, compromising pictures. It’s never been fully established. So, I mean, that’s just pure speculation. But whatever the case, Hoover decides to occupy himself with communists and civil rights activists, pretty much anything to avoid having to tackle the Mafia problem, an actual problem. So attempts to deal with the Mafia certainly through the courts were few and far between.
In 1935, an ambitious prosecutor, a special prosecutor, Tom Dewey, who later, of course, became a Republican presidential candidate, Tom Dewey was appointed by Governor Lehman of New York State to go after the New York Mob. Dewey is ambitious, and he wanted to get a win. So his first target was actually Dutch Schultz. But when Schultz hears about it and he decides he’s going to kill Dewey first, the Commission get very nervous. They don’t need the heat. So they bump Schultz off, and Dewey, disappointed, he’s still all fired up. So he decides he’s going to set his sights on Charlie Lucky Luciano, the Luciano. The member of his team, I’ve put her up here because there aren’t many women in this story, as I’m sure you’ll have guessed by now. The person who’s really responsible more than anyone for nailing Luciano is a brilliant member of Dewey’s team called Eunice Carter. And she starts a trail that ties Luciano to the running of a prostitution ring. So Dewey has got evidence, he’s got witnesses, and he prosecutes Luciano in 1936.
And Lucky Luciano is unluckily the only major mobster to have been convicted in this period. But after the trial, after the Luciano trial, there’s no real follow-up, and the Mafia is, again, left, by and large, alone and to just get on with things. So now the action is going to move, in so far as there is action, to Washington, DC. Because the next attempts to shine a light on the Mob take place in the nation’s capital. The first attempt is in 1951 in the Senate when Estes Kefauver, Senator Estes Kefauver assembles a committee to investigate the Mafia. But he struggles. Hoover’s FBI won’t cooperate. And even though he subpoenas a number of mobsters, they all stay strong, and none of them say anything worth recording, anything particularly meaningful. So the whole thing just kind of runs out of steam. But in 1961, with the election of JFK, there’s a young new attorney general, Kennedy’s brother, Bobby Kennedy, and he makes the pursuit of the Mob the Justice Department’s number one target.
The Mafia in New York are horrified by this. Why? Because they had been solicited by Joe Kennedy, and they’d worked for Joe Kennedy to help get JFK into the White House. So it comes as a huge shock when Bobby turns on them, and they let it be known that they despised the Kennedy brothers for what they saw as their perfidy. But no matter, Bobby and the Department of Justice was on the Mafia’s case. And that meant for the first time that a very, very reluctant J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI was forced to follow suit. The single biggest coup of this period is the tell-all intelligence that was received from an actual convicted Mafia soldier, whose name, and you can see him here, is Joe Valachi. Valachi had been arrested and convicted in 1962. Having become convinced that his boss Vito Genovese wanted him dead, he offered to turn state’s evidence in exchange for a deal. Valachi helped the authorities for the very first time paint a clear picture of what life inside the Mafia was actually like.
He confirmed the existence of the Mafia, which Hoover had denied until then. He confirmed the existence of the Five Families. He outlined in detail their organisational structure. He explained the effectiveness of omerta, the Mafia’s code of silence, and he identified the leaders of each of the families. So here’s Valachi. It’s 1963, and he’s now in front of the Senate committee, which is- There’s a series of hearings which became known as the Valachi hearings. And he’s explaining for the very first time in public in a televised session the secret initiation rites that a new soldier has to go. And we’re going to hear not just from Valachi, but from the chairman of that committee, the man who’s asking the questions, whose name is Senator John McClellan, and we’ll hear more from him in a few minutes. So here’s Valachi testifying.
Video clip plays.
Maranzano, well, he could talk pretty good English, Maranzano. He talked 12 languages. He went on to explain that you lived by the gun and by the knife, and you died by the gun and by the knife.
[Chairman] What kind of a ceremony did you go through in taking that oath?
Well, then he… He… He gave me a piece of paper, I was supposed to, you know, and burn it and-
Well, now without burning the paper, just take a piece of paper there and show us what, how you did it. You don’t need to set the paper on fire, but take a piece of- Give him a piece of paper. Let’s demonstrate just what you did.
In other words, now this piece of paper, this piece of paper is burned.
The paper is burned.
You light it.
Yeah.
And then in your hand, you say, well, again, they give you words in Italian, but I know what it meant.
[Chairman] In other words, while you were repeating the words, you were burning the paper.
Right, this is the way I burn if I expose this organisation.
[Chairman] And you would, that was symbolic of the fate that was to befall you if you betrayed the organisation.
Right, until the piece of paper burned.
[Chairman] You’d be burned to ashes?
Right.
[Chairman] Alright, now what else did you do in that ceremony?
Then after that, they got around a table and they threw numbers.
[Chairman] They drew what?
Numbers between one to five, for instance.
[Chairman] How you mean?
Well, here like this, throw three or one or five. Let’s say the way you got a table there right now, everybody throws a number.
In other words, we’d start down there at the table, somebody would hold up a number, each one would hold up some fingers.
[Valachi] Yeah, and we count the-
They could hold up as many as they wanted to.
Up to five.
[Chairman] Up to five. Well, that’s about all they go to on one hand.
Well, let’s say we start from you, Senator.
[Chairman] Yeah, we start with me.
And let’s say it’s 35-40.
See, I put up two.
Right.
And he put up some.
[Valachi] Now you add it all up. Let’s say we-
Then you add it all up.
Let’s say we get a figure about 38.
About 38, alright.
Then we start from you. And let’s say you go all around, and it comes to the Senator next to you.
Senator Mundt. Yeah, he’s next to me.
He is my what you call godfather. Then he picks your finger.
Who?
The godfather.
[Chairman] He picks your finger?
He picks your finger with a needle, makes a little blood come out. In other words, that’s to express the blood relation, supposed to be like brothers.
[Chairman] That’s the letting of blood.
That’s right.
[Chairman] In other words, symbolic of the fact you’re willing to spill your blood.
Right.
To give your blood, to give your life.
Yeah, as to what I’m telling you now, I need go no further, to say nothing else, this here, what I’m telling you, what I’m exposing to you and the press and everybody, this is my doom.
Video clip ends.
- So Joe Valachi and his testimony meant no one, no figure in law enforcement could ever again deny the existence of the Mafia, and they could no longer ever again operate completely in the shadows. But all these efforts, all this publicity, this was only a precursor to the work of these two men, Senator John McClellan, who we just saw, and G. Robert Blakey or Bob Blakey, as he was known. And their, it was their legal reforms that finally, once and for all, would leave the Mafia with nowhere to hide. McClellan was a tough, highly respected lawmaker. He was a Dixiecrat, a Southern Democrat, who’d chaired, already he chaired one committee in the 1950s that had investigated the Mob’s connections to labour unions. He was the one who had Jimmy Hoffa in front of him, and Bobby Kennedy was the counsel to that committee. So that’s where Bobby Kennedy got interested. And then in 1963, he chairs the Valachi hearings, as we just heard. But more importantly, he’s one of the senators for Arkansas, and what that meant is that he had no ties to big city Democratic politics.
So he didn’t care if the other Dems were embarrassed about any of the disclosures that were going to come out. Bob Blakey, meanwhile, at the time, I mean, he’s a bit older here, he was a fairly young idealistic prosecutor. He’d worked for Bobby Kennedy in Justice, so you can see how everyone is linked up, when Bobby was on his Mob campaign. And that’s where Blakey first discovered just the sheer extent of the Mob’s reach and the Mob’s power. McClellan and Blakey find each other, and they team up in the mid-1960s. And the result of their collaboration is two really landmark legal reforms. The first of these was known as Title III. It was passed in 1968. And Title III gave federal agents the legal right to use bugging devices and to tap telephones. Until then, you could use them to gather intelligence to intercept, but you couldn’t divulge it. So the FBI had all these wiretaps, but they were never able to use them and present them in a courtroom as evidence. So now they were. But even more important than that, the second reform, the second piece of legislation was the RICO Act.
And to give it its full name, RICO is the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organisations Act, and it’s passed in 1970. And the significance of RICO is that you can now go after the bosses, not just the minnows. RICO was a wholesale change to the conspiracy laws as they then existed. If a boss is involved, even indirectly, if a boss is involved in a criminal enterprise, you can now nail them. Blakey was repeatedly asked over the years why he chose the name RICO, the acronym RICO, and he never let on, he never divulged it. But it’s no accident that his favourite movie is “Little Caesar,” which I mentioned earlier, which was loosely modelled on Salvatore Maranzano’s life. Edward G. Robinson plays the merciless mobster, whose name is Enrico or Rico for short. Anyway, McClellan and Blakey devised a number of other innovations as well, all to ensure that they could obtain successful convictions of mobsters. And one of these was the Witness Protection Programme, which, of course, enables government to encourage turncoats by providing them with the promise of new lives and new identities far from the old identity and from the old environment if they’re willing to stand up and testify in court.
But still, even though these two pieces of legislation passed by 1970, it’s going to be another 10 years before law enforcement are actually willing to use RICO. The laws are all there. It’s just that the FBI and the police, I’m sorry to say this, but they preferred easier to solve crimes, things like bank hold-ups where you can get a quick notch on the belt. And prosecutors, when they looked at RICO, they didn’t like it either, because they just thought, well, all those wiretaps and bugs, it just sounds, it sounds too complicated. So here’s Bob Blakey for the whole of the 1970s going around the whole country patiently explaining to FBI bureau after bureau, to prosecutor after prosecutor, explaining RICO and begging the prosecutors and begging the FBI to use it. And it would take until 1983 before anyone took it seriously. It was actually another very ambitious prosecutor by the name of Rudy Giuliani who recognised the power of the new law and to decide to use these new laws to their fuller extent, to their full extent. Giuliani at the time had become the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is Manhattan. So he’s right there in the epicentre of the Mafia.
And to his credit, Giuliani, who’s never one for half measures, he decides to go after the heads of the Five New York Families and knock out their hierarchies. Most of the work is done by a talented lawyer on his staff whose name is Michael Chertoff. And if that name rings a bell, that’s because, of course, he was appointed much later on as America’s first Homeland Security Chief after 9/11. By the way, I have to say the small irony is Giuliani was hung by his own petard in 2023, last year. Because, if you recall, he was accused of being a part of the attempt to overturn the election results in Georgia, and he was charged under, yes, you’ve guessed it, the RICO laws. Anyway, that’s a little aside. Giuliani is the one who prosecutes what becomes known as the Mafia Commission Trial over 1985 and ‘86. And here’s Tony Salerno, Fat Tony Salerno, great photo, who was at the trial, who was one of the defendants. The trial involved 11 Mob leaders, including all the heads of New York’s Five Families. Eight of them, including Salerno, shown here, eight of them are convicted under RICO, and most of them were sentenced to a hundred years in prison, which was the maximum possible sentence that was allowed under the law.
“Time” magazine called the trial the case of cases, and possibly, quote, “the most significant assault on the infrastructure of organised crime since the leadership of the Chicago Mafia was swept away in 1943.” The longer-term impact of the trial was even greater than the trial itself because the FBI finally woke up. Because this law that none of them had understood, suddenly, you know, suddenly, you know, it becomes everybody’s favourite law. It becomes the favourite law of the FBI, favourite law of federal prosecutors because they realise that under the breadth of the definition of conspiracy, of criminal enterprise, of involvement in it, they can get almost anyone. Before we’re done, there’s one more nail in the coffin for the Mafia, and that’s the agreement of Sammy the Bull Gravano in 1991 to turn state’s evidence and testify in court against his boss, John Gotti. Sammy the Bull wasn’t the first rat, but he was the most senior that prosecutors ever had. And that’s because Sammy had been promoted to underboss to Gotti. After hearing Gotti make disparaging remarks to him, and this was wiretapping that was shown to him by the FBI, Sammy becomes convinced that Gotti’s going to order his death, and so he’s motivated to turncoat. There’s an interview with Sammy here that I’m not going to share because we’re already over time, but it’s, if you go to Google and you just look up Diane Sawyer’s ABC interview with Sammy the Bull, I mean, it’s really quite astounding.
I can really recommend it. Well, New York’s Mob families could just about weather Rudy Giuliani, but they were helpless against their own. And after Sammy cut his deal with prosecutors, the floodgates of betrayal swung open, never to be closed. Dozens of mafiosi ratted before they retired into the Witness Protection Programme, and the Mob’s defences at long last were broken. So, let’s bring the story up to date in the final few minutes. And I apologise, I apologise. Well, I kind of apologise for running over, but I’m sorry. It was so hard, it was so hard to cut this down. The Five Families, they still exist in New York, and they still have their tentacles in all kinds of places. But they’re a shadow of what they were in their heyday in terms of power and influence. In the past 20 years, they’ve supplemented their traditional lines of business with lucrative new enterprises, such as internet gambling. Law enforcement has been effective, so much so there’s been a shortage of men on the ground.
So the New York Mob has become adept at recruiting from Italy and from the Italian Mafia. And the Italian Mafia in kind uses New York as a kind of a graduate training ground, where their members will go to get toughened up. The Mob has learned to stay out of the limelight, and that means, where possible, no blood on the streets, in the words of one veteran anti-Mafia detective, “No hits, no headlines, less pressure.” The Mafia may have declined, but it seems like our appetite for books, movies, TV series, and video games that glamorise them is still insatiable. Why is that? I mean, why do we seem to love them? You know, these wise guys, as we call them, these goodfellas. And we don’t glamorise all violence. We don’t glamorise Charles Manson or Ted Bundy, or in the UK, Peter Sutcliffe or Fred and Rose West. So why do we hold up Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, and their ilk as this kind of mythic, almost heroic figures. I mean, why do we do that? I haven’t got a definitive answer. I mean, there’s certainly something about liking people who cock a snook to authority and get away with it.
It may have something to do with the fact, a mistaken belief that they only harm their own, which absolutely isn’t true in any way. That they, that somehow the rest of us feel safe from them. Maybe that makes them seem less threatening. Or maybe it’s just the glamour of the lifestyle, you know, all those colourful nicknames, and, you know, the glamour. Maybe that creates a kind of a psychological distance, you know, the feeling that we’re not watching real life, real criminals who do real harm to people. We’re just kind of watching a cartoon. I haven’t got the answer. What I do know, though, is the reality. And the reality is that there’s nothing warm and fuzzy, and there’s nothing to admire about the Mafia. For almost 100 years, their business has been crime, and their weapons have been intimidation, terror, and murder. Everything, everything they touched was corrupted. In the early 1960s, for example, a major schools building scandal came to light in New York. A whole generation of school children were subjected to filthy schools, collapsing roofs, crumbling walls, electric fire hazards, and in one school, sewage mixing with drinking water, all because the Mafia controlled the construction contracts and were happy to cut any corner they could and use the poorest-grade materials just to balloon their own profits. The financial cost to ordinary Americans runs into hundreds of billions of dollars.
The Mob taxed everything, all the staples of life, purchases of food, clothing, gasoline, even the garbage, where they inflated the cost of discarding every piece of trash. No construction project was ever safe from the Mob. They stole from housing projects, they stole from courthouse projects, and they stole from hospital projects. The human cost is also incalculable. Their feeding of hard drugs into America’s towns and cities has destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives. Organised crime was invented by the Mafia, but it hasn’t ended with the Mafia. Since the start of the 21st century, organised crime has resulted in roughly one million killings around the world, which is around the same number as every armed conflict around the world combined. Forget “The Godfather,” forget “Goodfellas,” forget “The Sopranos.” There’s nothing to admire about the American Mafia. Thank you and sorry for going on for too long. Okay, for those of you who are still up, let’s have a look at the comments and the questions, and we’ll see what people have to say.
Q&A and Comments:
Arlene says, “I visited Sicily about 10 years ago, and the Mafia was alive and thriving.” Oh yes, it absolutely is. Not just Sicily, but also Southern Italy. And you’ll see some massive construction projects in Sicily that have only been half built 'cause the Mafia decided to hold up the works and extort.
Monty says, “Samuel Liebowitz, an acclaimed criminal attorney, started his career defending petty crooks and mobsters. Used his knowledge of gefilte fish to win a client’s acquittal. On Google one can find him.” Very interesting, I haven’t come across Samuel Liebowitz, but I am definitely going to check him out. Thank you very much for that, Monty.
Q: “Did Samuel Bronfman from Canada supply a lot of the liquor to The States during Prohibition?”
A: Well, there’s a very interesting question, and I’m not going to answer that question for legal reasons, but you can draw your own conclusions.
Q: “Did women play any role in their criminal activities, or were they only gangsters’ molls?”
A: That was from Lorna. Women, certainly in the American Mafia, had no significant role to play. So thank you for that.
Yes, Rita, thank you for this. Rita has mentioned The Mob Museum, which is located in Vegas, as an excellent resource. Yes, if you go to their website, and she’s given it here, themobmuseum.org, very, very interesting. I’ve killed many an hour looking at that website.
Q: Jill asks, “Did Murder Inc. murder Jews?”
A: Oh yes, if they were given the contract and the money was right, they would murder anyone.
Yona, “You mentioned the Kosher Nostra and then talk about the Mafia milking the kosher poultry business, mixing dairy with meat.” You’re quite right, I have to mind my language. Thank you very much for pointing that out.
Q: Monty asks, “What about Jimmy Hoffa? He just disappeared.”
A: Jimmy Hoffa was never found, and there’s all kind of speculation about who exactly killed him. I mean, we know it was the Mafia. We don’t know exactly who it was. If you watch Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” then you get an answer. And that movie is all about the relationship between Jimmy Hoffa and the Mob, but no, we don’t know exactly who it was.
And Stewart says, “The Mob’s activities in Havana are described in this article,” and he’s given us a Wikipedia reference. Thank you for that, Stewart. And let’s just take a couple more.
Q: Carrie, Carrie Supper, hello, Carrie. “I was about to ask the same question as Lorna. Any women in the story? Surely there were. Besides the omission, thank you for some very nice things.”
A: Well, I mean, the reason I put Eunice Carter in there is because she was an extraordinary woman, but she was on the right side of the law.
But I don’t- Now Rita has answered the question. So Rita has pointed us to a page on The Mob Museum’s website, which is the top five women in the Mob. So I’m going to check that out afterwards. I’m really intrigued to know about that.
Q: "Was it Mafia revenge that was responsible for Bobby Kennedy’s murder?”
A: Well, I mean, there’s a- I think, Margaret, I think we’re going to end on that question. You and Catherine have asked about Bobby Kennedy’s and JFK’s assassination. We still speculate to this day. Will we ever know? I don’t know. I think all we can say for sure is that the Mafia certainly had every reason for wanting the JFK assassination. Did they want Bobby’s assassination by then? I don’t know. Were they involved? Will we ever know?
So on that note, thank you, everyone. Thank you for those of you who are still with us, and hope to see you all soon. Okay, bye-bye.