A Criminal History of Mankind (90 page)

One of the chief suspects behind the Colombo shooting was Joe Gallo, the lone ‘individualist’ who had gone to jail in 1961 and who came out ten years later. Gallo had spent his years in prison trying to make things difficult for the authorities, alleging persecution and being persecuted as a consequence. Back in his old territory, South Brooklyn he had immediately underlined his lack of respect for Joe Colombo by tearing down posters for the Civil Rights League and ordering Rocco Miraglia out of the district.

Ten years in jail had made Gallo decide that he was sick of being a gangster. After seeing a film called
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
- a spoof on the Mafia - he telephoned one of its leading actors, Jerry Orbach, and introduced himself. As a result, he became the friend of the Orbachs, and was soon being introduced to their society friends. Mrs Marta Orbach was impressed by his intelligence and his wide reading - he talked about Sartre, Camus, Céline, Kafka and Wilhelm Reich. ‘He needed people who were as bright as he was,’ Mrs Orbach said. The result was that Joey Gallo suddenly found himself a social celebrity. His new friends insisted that this was not the usual morbid interest in gangsters, but because he impressed them as genuinely intelligent and perceptive.

In March 1972, Gallo married a pretty divorcee with a young daughter. On 6 April he went to eat in a restaurant in Mulberry Street, which was on Joe Colombo’s territory. It was either an act of rash bravado, or an indication that he felt he had nothing to fear - in spite of being chief suspect in the attempted assassination at Columbus Circle. The following evening, Gallo was rash enough to return there to celebrate his forty-third birthday; he had his new wife and stepdaughter with him. A Colombo henchman who was in the restaurant when the party arrived hurried out to a telephone. Joe Yacovelli, the Colombo family ‘counsellor’, agreed that it was time to punish these incursions. Half an hour later, three men walked into the restaurant and began shooting. Gallo was killed by the first bullet, although it took him some time to die.

Although more gang murders followed Joey Gallo’s death - there were sixteen within a short period - his assassination seems to mark the end of an era. The Mafia had come to America more than ninety years earlier, when Giuseppe Esposito arrived in New Orleans from Sicily, and for the next fifty years it stamped its own vicious brand of individualism on American life. With the Luciano takeover and the formation of the Syndicate, it became a business organisation; but the men behind it still belonged to the old tradition of ruthless individualism. By the time of Colombo’s shooting, most of these figures were either dead or in ‘retirement’. Meyer Lansky had been forced to leave the country on tax evasion charges; Carlo Gambino had succeeded in avoiding a deportation order by collapsing with a heart attack. The new leaders of the Mafia have grown up in the Syndicate, and have acquired the mentality of members of a national corporation. Even if Gallo had decided to ‘go straight’ - as he insisted he had during the final months of his life - he would have remained a disturbing anachronism. He was a walking affront to the Organisation Man mentality. His death underlines a paradox: that in less than a century, the Mafia - a word that once signified contempt for authority - has itself turned into precisely the kind of authority it once rebelled against.

It seems equally paradoxical that, in this century of scientific crime fighting, the Mafia should have defied every attempt by the authorities to destroy it. The solution is that, where there are vast sums of money to be made, the wealthy criminal has no shortage of allies amongst the authorities. And by the 1970s, drug smuggling had become one of the world’s most prosperous industries. In 1960, a kilo of heroin cost about $2,500 in Marseilles, where it was manufactured from morphine base; in New York, it sold at about $6,000 a kilo wholesale, and at over $600,000 street price. By 1980, a kilo of grade four heroin cost about $12,000 from the supplier, and was worth a quarter of a million dollars in New York at wholesale prices. ‘Cut’ with mannite or lactose powder, its street price runs to many millions. No other business in the world provides such profits.

In 1962, a swoop by the New York Narcotics Bureau (dramatised as
‘The French Connection
’) dealt a crippling blow to the Marseilles drug traffic. Palermo, the original home of the Mafia, became the centre of the world’s drug traffic. Sixty per cent of America’s heroin came through Palermo. The result is that between 1973 and 1983, Palermo has become one of the richest cities in Italy. One result is that in the 1980s, Palermo has had an average of two gang murders per week.

Anybody who took an anti-Mafia stand was in danger. In 1982, the victims included two judges, two police chiefs and a leading Christian Democrat politician. And at this point, the Mafia apparently overreached itself. Pio La Torre, the Sicilian Communist Party leader was a relentless campaigner against the Mafia and a member of the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission; he had sponsored a bill to give the police special powers to deal with the Mafia, including access to private bank accounts and tapping telephone conversations. The ‘La Torre law’ failed to reach the statute book. On 30 April 1982, La Torre was ambushed and shot to death.

General Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the policeman who had defeated the Red Brigades, was appointed prefect of Palermo. When he arrived with his new young wife, he had a foreboding that he would be killed.

Dalla Chiesa pressed hard for the La Torre law to be passed, but the government dragged its feet. In a country as poor as Italy, it could be politically dangerous to destroy an industry that brings wealth.

Then on 3 September 1982, Alberto Dalla Chiesa was shot dead, together with his wife and his police escort. The result was that the Church launched a violent campaign against the Mafia; the Pope denounced it on a visit to Palermo. And the ‘La Torre law’ was passed by a guilt-ridden Parliament. The result has been Italy’s most successful campaign against the Mafia so far. In November 1982, sixty-five defendants came to trial in Palermo in what became known as the Spatola trial - after Rosario Spatola, the alleged Mafia ‘accountant’ whose multi-million-dollar ‘laundering’ operations had been opened to investigation by the new law. But with at least twenty backroom heroin refineries in Sicily capable of producing half a billion dollars’ worth of heroin a week, it seems doubtful whether even the anti-Mafia law can get to the root of the problem.

Compared to America and Italy, there is something engagingly amateurish about organised crime in Britain. After the trial of the Kray twins in 1969, it was revealed by their defence counsel that, at one point, the twins went to New York and tried to make some business arrangement with the Mafia, explaining that they ruled London, that the police were in their pay, and that they were immune from arrest. The Mafia sent an envoy to London - who was promptly arrested in the Mayfair Hotel and placed in Brixton jail to await deportation. ‘I thought you told me you ran this place?’ he said with disgust when the twins came to see him in prison.

Gangsterism came to Britain after the First World War; by the end of the 1920s, the slums of most major cities had their mobs of criminal hooligans. But the kind of gang warfare described in
No Mean City
has more in common with the present-day violence among gangs of Mexican teenagers in Los Angeles than with the American Mafia. That is to say, it is essentially a phenomenon of ‘territory’ - the ‘overcrowded rats syndrome’. Overcrowding heightens tension; tension heightens aggression. In a ‘normal’ social situation - without overcrowding - the dominant five per cent naturally find various outlets for their need for self-expression, from daydreaming to competitive sport. But in a society that teems with aggression, even the intelligent find themselves unable to ignore the challenge; their self-respect demands the ability to respond aggressively to aggression. So normal competition comes to express itself through violence.

In Glasgow in the 1920s there were dozens of gangs with names like the Norman Conquerors (from Norman Street), the Briggate Boys, the Beehive Gang and the South Side Stickers. Norman Lucas has argued in his book
Britain’s Gangland
that Peter Williamson, the leader of the Beehive Gang, was Britain’s first true gangleader. He enlisted various criminals, such as burglars and safebreakers, and ran a profitable business. Since guns are difficult to obtain in Britain, the Glasgow gangs used razors and broken bottles. Violence was casual and instantaneous. A newspaper reporter, Arthur Helliwell, told a story of a young man who saw someone being attacked in the street, and intervened; he was knocked unconscious with a bottle. He woke up to find a kindly-looking man asking anxiously: ‘Are you all right, son?’ When he nodded, the man said: ‘Well, next time, mind your own business,’ and slashed his cheek to the bone with a razor.

Even in the 1920s, football hooliganism was common in Glasgow. When a footballer named William Fullarton scored a winning goal in a match between two local Glasgow teams, he was afterwards battered unconscious with a hammer. He was so enraged that he formed his own gang - called ‘The Billy Boys’ - which took violent reprisals against the rival supporters. Fullarton’s natural leadership qualities made his gang one of the most formidable in the Gorbals, and he provoked some spectacular street battles with rival gangs. Fullarton was a Protestant, and he often marched through Catholic territory with a band playing Orange marches. He was arrested in 1934 after he led his gang into battle when drunk, clutching a baby girl in his arms. The danger to the child led the police to arrest him - with many broken heads - and he was sentenced to a year in prison. He fought in the Second World War and, when he came back, found that he had outgrown the need for violence. For the remainder of his life, he worked in a Clydebank shipyard. But when he died in 1962, vast crowds followed his coffin, and the floral tributes and brass band were reminiscent of a Chicago funeral of the 1920s; the inhabitants of Bridgeton - his old territory - remembered his days as a gangleader with affection.

The case is interesting because it is clear that, in less aggressive surroundings, Fullarton would have expressed his ‘dominance’ by becoming a well-known footballer; the beating turned him into a gangster.

Even more instructive is the more recent case of Jimmy Boyle, another gangster from the Gorbals. Boyle spent his first period in a remand home at the age of thirteen; by his late teens, he had become a Glasgow character, a ‘man of respect’ (to use the Mafia term) who made a more-than-adequate living out of the ‘protection’ racket. When a fellow gangster called Boyle an obscene name, Boyle slashed him with a razor; the man died, and Boyle was sentenced to fifteen years in jail. He became known as one of the most difficult prisoners ever held in a Scottish jail, a ‘mad dog’ - like Carl Panzram - who would attack a guard even when he knew it meant being beaten unconscious and spending months in solitary confinement. He ate with his fingers and smeared the walls of his cell with excrement. When news of his exploits reached the Glasgow public, there was a general feeling that he ought to have been ‘put down’ like a mad dog. After years of defiance, Boyle was finally transferred to the Barlinnie Experimental Special Unit, where prisoners were allowed an unusual degree of freedom. Boyle found it a shattering experience when a guard casually handed him a knife to cut the string of a parcel. He began to express himself through sculpture and writing. His autobiography,
A Sense of Freedom
, was an immediate success. Now released from prison - and working actively for prisoners’ welfare - it is clear that Boyle has also outgrown his violence. The dominance that once found its expression in violence has been re-routed into creativity. Unlike Panzram, Boyle was able to turn back before he had gone too far.

It seems clear that the gangster mentality is usually created by slum conditions in which ‘territory’ becomes a matter for dispute. Without subscribing to the view that criminals are unfortunate victims of an unfair society, we can nevertheless recognise that men like Joey Gallo and Jimmy Boyle would never have become gangsters if they had been born into a middle-class environment and attended high school and university. Then why, since Britain has as many slums as America, have the gangs never succeeded in infiltrating British society in the way that the Mafia has infiltrated America? The answer seems to lie in the British ‘genius for compromise’. The temperance movement in Britain was as powerful as in America in the early twentieth century; but it would have been inconceivable for the British Parliament to vote for Prohibition. In America, Cosa Nostra derives a huge part of its income from drugs. In Britain, a drug addict can get his drugs on the National Health, provided he agrees to treatment; so the opportunities for a British drugs syndicate are circumscribed.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, it looked for a while as if Mafia-style gangsterism had come to England. With the end of the First World War, England turned its back decisively on Victorianism. There was a new sexual freedom, and a determination to have a good time. Race meetings became more popular than ever before; and since vast sums of money changed hands, one inevitable result was the formation of race gangs. The bookmakers were expected to pay ‘protection’, and to purchase various other services and amenities - stools, race cards, even chalk - from the gangs. A Birmingham gang, known as the Brummagem Boys and led by a man named Bill Kimber, dominated most of the Midlands and much of the north. But when they attempted to move south, they encountered a rival gang from London’s Italian quarter, the Sabini Boys, led by Charles, Harry and Joseph Sabini. These were reported to be connected with the Sicilian Mafia. Throughout the 1930s, there were violent clashes between the Brummagem Boys and the Sabini gang. One battle in London’s Mornington Crescent ended with the arrest of Joseph Sabini and five of his men; the police also collected a number of revolvers and other dangerous weapons. At the trial at the Old Bailey, witnesses failed to appear, or had suffered lapses of memory. A member of the Brummagem gang was found shot in the street near the flat of Charles Sabini, but claimed he had no idea who fired the gun. It began to look as if there was nothing to stop the Sabini Mafia from becoming as powerful as its counterpart in New York - particularly after a tremendous battle at Bath race course, which ended with the permanent retreat of the Brummagem Boys back to the Midlands. A rival gang from Hoxton began to invade the Sabini territory, and their battles at various race tracks so inflamed public opinion that the police decided on tough action. When sixteen members of the Hoxton gang were arrested after a battle at Lewes race course, all were given stiff jail sentences. And by the beginning of the Second World War, when the Sabini brothers were interned as enemy aliens, the race gangs had ceased to enjoy immunity, and dozens of their members were in jail for long periods. There was no national Syndicate to ensure ‘business as usual’ while the gang bosses were in jail.