Reclaiming History (263 page)

Throughout the years, New York City alone has been the home of five of the twenty-four Mafia families in the United States (currently the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese families), and New Jersey one. Each “family” (or
borgata
) is headed by a
capo
or boss or don, the second in command being the
sotto-capo
or underboss. A
consiglieri
or counselor is typically an elder member who serves as an adviser. A “crew” or “regime” of ten or so foot soldiers of the “family” is controlled by a midlevel boss referred to as a
caporegima
or lieutenant, whose job is to carry out the orders of the capo within the family. The Mafia members who perform the everyday business are called
soldati
, the soldiers or “button men” who are taking the initial step necessary to rise in the family.

Before organized crime’s substantial disintegration in the 1980s and 1990s, the Mafia in the United States was controlled by a group resembling a board of directors, as it were, known as “the commission.” The commission established policy and settled all important disputes. Though not every boss of a mob family was on the commission, every member of the commission was a Mafia family boss.
²⁰
In Mafia leader Joseph Bonanno’s 1983 autobiography,
A Man of Honor
, he said that although Mafia leaders from around the country could sit on the commission, its most important members, and the only permanent ones, were the heads of the five New York City mob families.
²¹
The commission is no longer believed to exist.
²²

“The commission” and the “national crime syndicate” (in which organized crime went national under a corporate-like umbrella) were created by Mafia
capo de tutti capi
(boss of all bosses) Charles “Lucky” Luciano (true name, Salvatore Lucania). Mob historians give different years for the birth of the commission and crime syndicate, most saying they took place at a meeting of mob leaders in Chicago in 1931. But Luciano’s biographer says the year was 1933 and it was at a mob meeting at a Park Avenue hotel in New York City. The distinguishing feature about the national syndicate is that it included racketeers and gangs who were not Italian, and hence, not a part of the Mafia. Luciano felt there was strength in diversity and cooperation, and the Italian mob families, he proposed, would be willing to recognize a criminal organization in a city or area of the country in which they were not operating, and give them autonomy. However, disputes and territorial problems would inevitably develop and they would be resolved by the syndicate’s board of directors, which came to be known as the aforementioned national commission,
²³
and whose members were and remained exclusively Italian.

Luciano emerged as the Mafia’s top leader in 1931 following the three-year Castellammarese War (so-named because most of the participants came from the region of northwestern Sicily near Castellammare del Golfo) between two New York City mob families, a deadly conflict in which many were killed, including the heads of both families, Salvatore Maranzano and Joseph Masseria.
*
Luciano ran his loosely knit but vast criminal empire from his luxurious suite at the top-of-the-line Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City, where he lived under the alias “Charles Rose.”
²⁴

The commission, Luciano thought and others came to agree, could help avoid such bloody conflicts in the future.

Luciano was born in 1897 near Palermo, Sicily, and grew up in the toughest section of New York City at the time, the Lower East Side near the Brooklyn Bridge. It was during this period that Luciano aligned himself with Meyer Lansky to form one of the most powerful and long-standing relationships in mob history.
†
Legend has it that, for a penny or two a day, “Luciano offered younger and smaller Jewish kids his personal protection against beatings on the way to school. If they didn’t pay, he’d beat them up. One runty kid refused to pay, a thin little youngster from Poland, Meyer Lansky. Luciano fought him one day and was amazed how hard Lansky fought back. They became bosom buddies after that.”
²⁵

In addition to creating a national crime syndicate, Luciano made other changes among the six New York and New Jersey families, one of which endeared him to Mafia foot soldiers like no one before or since. Previously, a Mafia don could order the death of a low-level Mafia member for any reason at all, and no one could object, creating a state of fear and anxiety in the men. Luciano decreed that hereafter, the ultimate penalty could not be imposed unless the charges by the boss against the Mafia member were presented to a special judicial council consisting of a representative from each of the six families, and only the “court,” by a majority vote, could approve of the man’s death. (In the event of a tie, the boss of the family seeking the member’s death would have the deciding vote.)

And then there was the old tradition of Mafia members greeting each other with a kiss. Loathed by most new members, Luciano changed the greeting to a handshake, satisfying the old-country “Mustache Petes” that this was a bad practice. “We stick out,” he said, “kissing each other in restaurants and places like that.”
²⁶
But there was one tradition Luciano was in no mood to tamper with in the least. Once becoming a member, one could not leave the Mafia. “The only way out is in a box,” he said.
²⁷
Arrivederci Roma
, yes.
Arrivederci borgata
, no.

The mob, whose lifestyle has been romanticized with great commercial success in novels and on the big screen, and whose mythological culture of honor among thieves (“Code of the Underworld”) and genuine loyalty to family and respect for women and children have unquestionably forged a psychological connection to the American public (witness the enormous popularity of
The Sopranos
and mob films like the
Godfather
series,
Goodfellas, Donnie Brasco
, and many more),
*
saw its mostly uncontested salad days in America come to an end when Robert F. Kennedy was appointed attorney general by his brother, President John F. Kennedy, in January of 1961. Prior to that, the Department of Justice, which the attorney general heads, did not focus heavily on organized crime in America, although after the discovery of the mob summit meeting in the obscure New York town of Apalachin in 1957, RFK’s predecessor, William P. Rogers, did increase the size of the organized-crime section and attempted to instill some life into it. But little was being done. William Hundley, who took over the organized-crime section at the Department of Justice in 1958, was shocked to find “there was absolutely nothing going on in the Justice Department…There was only a couple of guys in the OC section clipping newspapers.”
²⁸

Actually, it was more than that. Since leading mob figures from around the country were able to leave their respective cities to attend the meeting without the FBI having any knowledge of their movements (the FBI would never have even known of the meeting if a New York State Police sergeant hadn’t discovered it), Rogers set up a special group on organized crime in his office under the supervision of his assistant, Milton R. Wessel. The purpose of this group was to serve as a clearinghouse to coordinate the activities of mob figures, but it received no support from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, on which the group was necessarily dependent for its raw data. In fact, at the annual convention of the International Association of Police Chiefs in Los Angeles on October 3, 1960, when the proposal for a national nerve center to coordinate the fight against organized crime was formally presented, Hoover, greatly respected by police chiefs around the country, took the podium to tell the chiefs that “the persons who endorse these grandiose schemes have lost sight of some basic facts. America’s compact network of state and local law enforcement agencies traditionally has been the nation’s first line of defense against crime. Nothing could be more dangerous to our democratic ideals than the establishment of an all-powerful police agency on the federal scene. The truth of these words is clearly demonstrated in the experience of nations ruled by ruthless tyrants both here in the Western Hemisphere and abroad.” The proposal was not adopted and Wessel’s nascent group was abolished.
²⁹
It was clear that as late as 1960, Hoover was resisting the notion of his FBI vigorously pursuing organized crime in America.

Henry Peterson, a career prosecutor in the attorney general’s office who served under RFK’s predecessors (including Rogers) as well as RFK, and eventually headed the organized-crime section under Attorney General Ramsey Clark, said that before Robert Kennedy, “When you talked about organized crime, people would ask you to define what you meant. Robert Kennedy came in and said, ‘Don’t define it, do something about it.’ His instructions were: ‘Don’t let anything get in your way. If you have problems, come see me. Get the job done, and if you can’t get the job done, get out.’”
³⁰
Author William Shannon wrote that RFK’s “zeal to break up the syndicates was reminiscent of a sixteenth century Jesuit on the hunt for heresy.”
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One big reason for the Department of Justice not focusing heavily on organized crime before RFK’s tenure is that the department’s investigative arm, Hoover’s FBI, was using most of its resources during this period to combat Communism domestically—a mission with which virtually everyone agrees Hoover was obsessed. Although some have said the reason for the FBI’s inattention to organized crime was that the mob (specifically Meyer Lansky) possessed compromising photographs of Hoover in homosexual situations and blackmailed him into calling off his dogs, no credible evidence has ever surfaced to substantiate this allegation.
*

The chief peddler of this argument is conspiracy theorist Anthony Summers. But the “evidence” Summers cites is so sleazy and so transparently unworthy of belief (e.g., that Hoover, who we know was more concerned about his reputation and legacy than perhaps any other public figure in America, would go out in public to famous nightclubs and racetracks and hold hands with his alleged lover, Clyde Tolson; dress up like a woman and engage in sex orgies with several participants at leading New York hotels; have homosexual sex parties at his home with men, including some of the top officials at the FBI; and permit mobsters to point to him at racetracks and shout out loud, so everyone could hear, that he was a “fucking, degenerate queer”) that I’m not going to dignify Summers’s charges by a serious discussion of them. I don’t know what Hoover’s sexual orientation was.
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What I do know is that Summers failed miserably in trying to prove his allegation. How he got a book published in 1993 with scurrilous trash like this in it, I don’t know.
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Summers picked on an awfully difficult guy for his preposterous allegations. Even if Hoover had the sexual orientation Summers asserts he did, by all accounts he was exceptionally proper, even stiff in his demeanor. Compare the following description of Hoover with Summers’s Hoover: When recalling her going to Washington to testify before the Warren Commission, Marina Oswald said, “Seven or more men met me; apparently they were all FBI. But when I shook hands with Mr. Hoover, who was with them, I was chilled from top to bottom. It was as if you met a dead person. He had a coldness like someone from the grave.”
³³
Though Hoover was no prude, taking an occasional drink and dining regularly at night spots like Toots Shor’s, 21, and the Stork Club in New York, friends said they never heard him tell an off-color story in his life.
³⁴

Hoover’s counterpart in the federal intelligence community for several years was CIA Director Richard Helms. He was quite familiar with Hoover’s lifestyle, describing it as extremely routine, even banal. He goes on to say that “in the Washington fish bowl…I find it impossible to believe that anyone as well known and as easily identified as Hoover might have managed a clandestine sex life. Was Hoover eccentric? Yes. Very eccentric? Yes, indeed. An active homosexual? No way.”
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Here’s what Cartha D. “Deke” DeLoach, the deputy director, the number-three man in the FBI hierarchy, who worked alongside Hoover and Tolson for many years, has to say:

When Anthony Summers’
Official and Confidential
was first published, I read it with disbelief…Summers charges in his book that Hoover and [Clyde] Tolson [Hoover’s number-one assistant in the FBI] were homosexual lovers…It so disgusted me that I simply put it out of my mind. Even when it was repeated in newspapers and echoed on TV talk shows, I concluded that the fair-minded people of America would reject so ridiculous an accusation based on such flimsy evidence, that their good sense would see through the fraud. But…I discovered that in the wake of Summers’ book, Hoover’s homosexuality was widely accepted as undeniable truth…Neither man [Hoover and Tolson] was a homosexual…No one who knew Hoover and Tolson well in the FBI has ever even hinted at such a charge.
You can’t work side by side with two men for the better part of twenty years and fail to recognize signs of such affections
. Contrary to what Summers would have you believe, neither Hoover nor Tolson was the least bit effeminate. Both were tough and manly.
³⁶

As indicated, there is no credible evidence that Hoover’s not going after organized crime was connected to his sexual orientation. So what was his reason? According to DeLoach, it was much more simple. Although organized crime was a national organization run by the commission of mob leaders since the early 1930s, as late as 1957 “Hoover had insisted there was no such thing as La Cosa Nostra…He believed the gangs were local, and he expected local authorities to take care of the problem
*
…His enormous faith in the agency he had created persuaded him that no such complex
national
criminal organization could exist without him knowing about it. He didn’t know about it; ergo, it did not exist.”
³⁷