Cosa Nostra (30 page)
Authors: John Dickie
In 1916, the other members of the Morello mafia fought a war against Brooklyn Neapolitans; Piddu’s brother was shot dead in an ambush outside a coffee shop in Navy Street, Brooklyn. The Neapolitans failed in their attempt to take over the Morello monopoly on a key component of the Italian diet: artichokes. The trade in this particular vegetable was controlled by Piddu’s half-brother Ciro Terranova, who would remain the ‘artichoke king’ into the 1930s. The Morello gang emerged victorious in the war when the Neapolitan leaders were arrested and, to their great surprise, sent to jail for the killing.
Piddu Morello was released soon afterwards. He was apparently spotted in Sicily in 1919, trying to get support from men of honour in the old country because his successor as supreme boss had condemned him to death. These diplomatic efforts seem to have been successful because he survived to fight three years later alongside the same man who had condemned him. But by that time, the landscape of organized crime in America had altered radically.
The single most important turning point in the history of organized crime in America was not an execution, a meeting of senior mobsters, or the arrival of some ‘superboss’ from Sicily. It was the approval of Prohibition. In January 1919, after a boost from a ludicrous wartime outcry against brewers of German origin, the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was passed; it banned the ‘manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors’. Later the same year the Volstead Act provided for the Eighteenth Amendment’s enforcement. At a stroke, one of the country’s most lucrative industries was handed over to criminals. From raw materials, production, packaging, and transport right down to the table at the speakeasy, gangsters raked in colossal tax-free profits from booze. Prohibition is estimated to have put $2 billion into the illegal economy before it was abolished in 1933.
At the same time, simply because many ordinary Americans liked a drink and could not see why they were not allowed to have one, the gangsters became the consumers’ friend. The high mortality rate among bootleggers added glamour to their job. ‘They only kill each other,’ was the common view. The vast profits that accrued from booze, and the benign public attitude to its illegal manufacture, also lowered the threshold of corruption. Police, politicians, and judiciary took their share of the bonanza.
The criminal free-for-all that was Prohibition made America forget its turn-of-the-century fascination with the mafia and the Mano nera. It was simply not feasible to treat bootlegging as if it were the fruit of a ‘dago’ invasion. The mass influx of people from Europe was brought to a halt by the First World War. When peace returned, a series of laws closed what Americans liked to call the ‘Golden Door’ on arrivals—or at least those who did not have the clandestine channels open to mafiosi. The classic gangster years between the two world wars were an era dominated in the public mind by multi-ethnic ‘mobsters’ and ‘hoodlums’, not by Italian ‘mafiosi’ and ‘men of honour’.
It was not until the 1950s that American public opinion would again begin to confuse the mafia with organized crime per se. The publication of Mario Puzo’s
The Godfather
in 1969 then set in concrete the mistaken public perception that American syndicates were entirely a Sicilian import. The facts about the Prohibition era speak clearly against this perception: in the New York metropolitan area, 50 per cent of bootleggers were Jewish, compared to about 25 per cent who were Italian.
Yet within the Italian communities in cities right across America, a specifically Sicilian mafia association was already well established when Prohibition was introduced. The best witness to their history in the 1920s and 1930s is Nicola Gentile, a man born in Sicily but initiated into the mafia in Philadelphia in 1905. He was known as ‘Nick’ or ‘Cola’ depending on which side of the Atlantic he happened to find himself. In 1963, Gentile, now nearing eighty and living in retirement in Rome, made an unprecedented resolution: he decided to write his autobiography. He handed it over, part dictated, to a journalist who helped him fill in gaps in a series of interviews. Gentile was the first Sicilian man of honour ever to tell his own story in this way.
A lingering mystery surrounds the reasons for Gentile’s decision. As always in Italy, the political context probably has something to do with it. Yet the simplest motives, the ones proffered by Gentile himself, are as likely to be the most important. He describes himself as an embittered old man. His children were all established in professional careers, but they were ashamed of the criminal origins of their wellbeing and shunned the man who had paid for their education, their houses.
Cola Gentile’s narrative is an ambiguous attempt to justify his life—as much to himself as to anyone else. He strives, not always successfully, to present himself as a ‘man of honour’ in what he claims is the true sense, someone who had always sought the path of peace and justice within the organization. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that Gentile had been trying to show himself in this flattering light for quite some time. One man claims to have spent a whole afternoon talking to him in 1949; indeed, he quite fondly remembers being patronized by Gentile, who addressed him half-mockingly as
duttureddu
(‘little professor’) throughout. The man in question—a young student at the time—says that the veteran man of honour explained his approach to being a mafioso with a hypothetical story:
Duttureddu,
if I come in here unarmed, and you pick up a pistol, point it at me and say: ‘Cola Gentile, down on your knees.’ What do I do? I kneel. That does not mean that you are a
mafioso
because you have forced Cola Gentile to get down on his knees. It means you are a cretin with a pistol in your hand.
Now if I, Nicola Gentile, come in unarmed, and you are unarmed too, and I say to you: ‘
Duttureddu,
look, I’m in a bit of a situation. I have to ask you to get on your knees.’ You ask me ‘Why?’ I say: ‘
Duttureddu,
let me explain.’ And I manage to convince you that you have to get on your knees. When you kneel down, that makes me a
mafioso.
If you refuse to get on your knees, then I have to shoot you. But that doesn’t mean I have won: I have lost,
duttureddu.
Gentile apparently had problems sustaining even a hypothetical mental picture of himself without a gun in his hand.
The ‘duttureddu’ was Andrea Camilleri, now a literary phenomenon in Italy. His crime fiction, written in a mellow, ironic prose richly inflected with Sicilian dialect, dominates the best-seller list. There is no way of independently confirming how reliable Camilleri’s memory of this encounter is. But it does capture the way in which the old gangster Cola Gentile, despite his best efforts to seem noble, is honest about the violence that comes with his job. In his autobiography he conceded that ‘You cannot become a
capomafia
without being ferocious.’
At the same time that Nick Gentile was quietly recounting his story in Rome, a similar precedent was being set in the US. Joe Valachi, an American mafioso who feared he was going to be killed in prison by his former associates, was talking to federal agents. It was Valachi who first told the world that mafiosi in the US tend to refer to their organization as ‘cosa nostra’. Intense publicity surrounded Valachi when he testified to a Congressional Sub-Committee on organized crime in 1963. Robert Kennedy, appointed attorney general by his brother the President, described Valachi’s evidence as ‘the biggest single intelligence breakthrough yet in combatting organized crime and racketeering in the United States’.
The Valachi Papers
sold in large numbers.
But as more cautious observers pointed out right from the outset, Valachi did not count in the American mafia. He was a mere foot soldier who would not have been party to discussions at the highest level. By contrast Cola Gentile, the sad and lonely don in the Roman suburbs, moved in elite criminal circles. He worked closely with all the most famous bosses of the 1920s and 1930s: Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Vincenzo Mangano, Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese. Surprisingly, Cola Gentile’s Italian testimony remains untranslated and unknown to all but a few people outside of the peninsula.
* * *
Gentile’s story takes place against a background shaped by the transformation of ordinary Sicilian migrants into Americans. At the same time, paradoxically, they were becoming Italian. Italy has a notoriously weak sense of national fellow feeling. The huddled masses from Palermo, Naples, and Parma would arrive at Ellis Island speaking mutually incomprehensible dialects. ‘Italy’ for many of them was an abstraction. In the encounter with new arrivals from other countries, they began to think of themselves as Italians for the first time. They adapted customs from the old country, or latched on to new ones like Columbus Day, to express this acquired Italian identity.
Italian-American criminals were going through a similar change, but in their case assimilation was a bloodier and more Machiavellian affair. By 1920, there were 1 million ethnic Italians in New York alone. Only a small proportion of them, needless to say, were criminals. But the community’s increasing wealth offered a plethora of illegal economic niches. It also brought into closer contact mobsters originating in different parts of Italy. Street lotteries were as popular in Italian-American neighbourhoods as they had been in the hundred cities of Italy. The southern Italian diet also provided targets. The threat of violence could be used to profit from the traffic in foodstuffs like olive oil that came from Europe—or increasingly from the west coast of the United States, like Ciro Terranova’s artichokes.
Italians had also become the most numerous ethnic group in New York’s docks. In 1880, 95 per cent of the city’s longshoremen were Irish. By 1919, 75 per cent were Italian. They were particularly dominant on the East Side and in Brooklyn. The Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn—Italian through and through—was the seat of a syndicate for the whole inter-war period and beyond. The system operating in the docks was all-embracing, brutal, and highly lucrative. International Longshoremen’s Association officials bullied workers to ensure their union’s monopoly over recruitment. They bribed shipping and stevedoring company managers to ensure a monopoly over the work that was available. Political protection was assured through the City Democratic Club founded in the late 1920s—it was little more than a mob front. Smuggling, robbery, and extortion were endemic. Many of the ILA officials were from the same small group of blood families. They were backed by a uniquely ruthless protection regime run by men like Albert Anastasia and Vincent Mangano.
* * *
Cola Gentile was born in a sulphur town near Agrigento. When he arrived in America in 1903 he was only eighteen years old, a tough youth with a high sense of his own worth—the classic raw material of the mafioso. He moved to Kansas City where he began work as a travelling fabric salesman. His product was based on a confidence trick: the rolls of cloth that he sold as linen were nothing of the sort—apart from a small sample.
Through his work Gentile made contacts in many US cities, gaining a reputation as a sharp kid who could look after himself and his friends. At twenty-one he was initiated into the mafia in Philadelphia. Three years later he returned to his home village in Sicily as a man with money and status. He married and had a child before heading back to America to continue his career within the honoured society. His wife and child remained on the island.
In 1915, he moved to Pittsburgh and recruited a group of ten
picciotti
—young thugs—loyal only himself, independent of the local capo. They were to be the instrument of his rise. Gentile found that the honoured society in the Iron City was subordinated to a large gang of Italians from Calabria and Naples whose power base was the wholesale fruit and vegetable market. Even the mafia capo collected protection money from the Sicilian community on behalf of these Camorristi, as Gentile dismissively called them. (He had in mind the Camorra of Naples—a less-organized criminal fraternity.)
Gentile’s reputation in Pittsburgh was made quickly. He and one of his men created a sensation by executing a man in a crowded city-centre bar. Boosted by the success of this operation, Gentile decided to take advantage of the Sicilian capo’s submissiveness towards the Camorristi. His
picciotti
set to work: a series of rapid and efficient killings quickly brought the men from the Italian mainland to the negotiating table. The leaders of the two sides met under Gentile’s chairmanship. He humiliated the Camorristi by openly threatening them with all-out war if they so much as offended another Sicilian. They meekly submitted to Sicilian leadership. ‘From that evening the
camorra
in Pittsburgh and the towns around it was finished,’ Gentile concluded. Shortly afterwards he had the Pittsburgh mafia capo shot and sent back to Sicily in a luxury coffin. Cola Gentile had turned himself into the boss of Italian crime in the city. In the process he had made his own early contribution to the Americanization and Italianization of the mafia.
One of the remarkable things about Nick Gentile’s career is his geographical mobility. He transferred his membership many times from one
cosca
to another: first Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, then San Francisco, Brooklyn, Kansas City, and back to Brooklyn. Gentile refers to these groups as
borgate,
the Italian term for the kind of suburban townships around Palermo that were the cradle of the honoured society.
Each time he changed
borgata,
Gentile needed a testimonial from a senior boss back home in the province of Agrigento. The letters or telegrams would take the form of a character reference, as if for an ordinary job. Clearly the mafia in the old country was important enough to its wealthy new offshoot in the States for this kind of authentication of membership to be necessary. Italian investigating magistrates have good evidence that this system of references operated until at least the early 1980s.
