The Everything Mafia Book (28 page)

Courtesy of AP Images

New Orleans underworld figure Carlos Marcello, left, leaves federal court with Shreveport, La., attorney Michel Maroun, where Marcello’s trial on charges of assaulting an FBI agent went to the jury, in Laredo, Texas, May 28, 1968.

His sphere of influences included most of the southern and western states, including California, plus pre-Castro Cuba, the Caribbean, and Mexico. His illegal income funded numerous and diverse legitimate businesses.

Carlos Marcello and the New Orleans mob continued to prosper and avoid the long arm of the law for many years. But nothing lasts forever, and eventually the FBI caught up with him. In 1981, after decades of seeming invulnerable, the don of the New Orleans Mafia was found guilty of violating the RICO law. He bounced around several federal prisons in the six years he was incarcerated, most of them minimum-security “country club” institutions. He developed Alzheimer’s disease in prison and was released.

The mighty little man who ruled a massive criminal empire degenerated into dementia and infantilism and died in 1993. The family leadership was picked up by his brother Joseph, who continued his ties with the Tampa and New York Mafia families. After Joe, Anthony Carolla took over, until the feds busted him for involvement in a gaming scam.

Carlos Marcello spoke with such a thick Cajun accent, other mobsters complained about having a hard time understanding him. And though small in stature, Carlos Marcello was a feared man. He had an ominous credo posted on the wall in his Metaire headquarters: “Three can keep a secret if two are dead.”

Dallas, Texas

The Dallas mob is most famous for one of its low-level members, Jack Ruby, who gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald after he was arrested and charged with the assassination of President John Kennedy. Ruby was an intimate of the local don, Joe Civello, a native of Baton Rouge. Civello ascended to power after the reigns of Carlos and Joseph Piranio. The Dallas family was under the thumb of the larger New Orleans Mafia, as was a small offshoot mob group in Galveston led by the Maceos. After Civello died in 1972, the FBI considered the family inactive, but Joe Campisi oversaw some operations for the New Orleans family until his death in 1990.

“Open” Cities and Outposts

Mobsters need vacation time too. For this reason the sunny paradise of Miami (as well as the gaming destination of Las Vegas) was considered an “open city,” meaning any Mafia family could operate there without having to get permission. Things got so bad with mobsters from around the world descending on the South Florida city that Miami was declared “the international headquarters of organized crime.”

Then there were the outpost cities. Comprised of small mob crews from larger families, they were sent out to set up operation in cities without a sizeable mob presence. This enabled bosses to expand their empire with little bloodshed.

Miami, Florida

Since the 1920s Miami has been the playground of vacationing mobsters. Gangsters from the frigid north took a train or plane to the luxurious hotels and sandy white beaches of the quasi-tropical paradise. Many of the major mob figures like Meyer Lanksy, Al Capone, and John Gotti spent time and ran operations in the southern port city. The close contact between the mobsters gave rise to a lot of interfamily schemes. Gambling, stock fraud, stolen property rings, and narcotics were the big moneymakers. By the 1990s authorities estimated that over 600 members and associates of all the crime families in America were either living full or part time in South Florida. Cuban, Colombian, Haitian, Russian, and Israeli gangsters joined them. In recent years Mafia activity has moved north from Miami to Ft. Lauderdale and Boca Raton.

Des Moines, Iowa

Iowa would be the absolute last place anyone would think of having a Mafia family, but a small offshoot of the Chicago mob operated there. Louis Fratto was the longtime mob “boss” of Des Moines. A capo in the Chicago Outfit, Fratto ran labor racketeering and gambling with a small crew. He was a close associate of San Giancana and Tony Accardo. He died in 1967 while under indictment for interstate fraud. His son Johnny is a minor celebrity and a frequent guest on the Howard Stern radio show.

San Diego, California

There was an active Mafia presence in San Diego, though it was never an official family. Los Angeles capo, and FBI informant, Frank Bompensiero operated lucrative rackets there before he ran afoul of the LA leadership and was murdered in 1977. Chicago sent down Chris Petti to oversee their interests in Indian gaming. Petti died in 2006. The final group was the Matranga family. The Sicilian-born mobsters operated restaurants and were suspected of being major international drug traffickers in the 1950s.

Youngstown, Ohio

Youngtown was not an open city in the traditional sense. Rather, it was split between the Cleveland and Pittsburgh families. For years the two families worked side by side running gambling, loansharking, stolen property rings, and narcotics in town. But as the city’s fortunes declined as the steel industry collapsed, the mobs started warring with each other for control. Lenny Strollo, a Pittsburgh mobster, became the de facto “boss” of the Mahoning Valley. Following the murders of gangsters Joey Naples and Ernie Biondillo in the 1990s, federal authorities moved in with sweeping indictments of mobsters and politicians. Strollo decided to cooperate and became a government witness, eventually providing information against representative James Traficant.

CHAPTER 14
Just Say No

For years the Mafia had a love/hate relationship with the world of illegal drugs. The Mafia protested much about its involvement with drugs, but to some extent they always were, and finally the allure of the big money became too great. Narcotics has become a massive moneymaking entity, dwarfing the gross domestic product of most countries. And from the beginning the Mafia was right there in the thick of it. This chapter will look at the Mafia’s involvement in the drug trade.

Drug Abuse in America

Contrary to what many people believe, drug use in America did not begin with the hippies in the 1960s. Drugs have been popular since humans first discovered the natural kick in certain chemicals in plants and then learned to refine and fine-tune them for greater potency.

In the late nineteenth century, “opium dens” were easy to find. Patrons could go into these dimly lit and seedy establishments—usually run by Chinese immigrants—smoke opium, and be provided a cot to recline on to enjoy their drug-induced reverie. When opium was outlawed, addicts turned to a legal substitute—heroin. Yes, heroin was legal in the United States. In 1898 the Bayer pharmaceutical company touted heroin as a non-addictive substitute for the highly addictive painkiller morphine. Astoundingly, even Coca-Cola was laced with cocaine for a time in the nineteenth century. Drugs have always been around, and there has always been a subculture of addicts.

Many drugs that are now illegal were once readily available and enthusiastically consumed by the general public. Vin Mariani was a popular drink in the nineteenth century. Made of cocaine-laced wine, it was served in saloons and bistros in Europe and America.

Some people were aware of the gravity of the drug problem. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, was also a medical doctor like his fictional character Dr. Watson. Doyle’s fictional mouthpiece regularly warns Sherlock Holmes about the dangers associated with Holmes’s cocaine use. Dr. Doyle, through the voice of Dr. Watson, was in the minority in his belief about the insidious nature of cocaine, but he and other medical men were ahead of their time in their belief that it was much more than a harmless recreational drug.

The Narcotics Cops

The first attempt by the government to control the use of narcotics by Americans was the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. It did not do much good. It required businesses that dealt in opium and cocaine products to register with the federal government and, of course, taxed them a penny per ounce on items they shipped through the United States Postal Service. Doctors were allowed to dispense heroin, opium, and morphine to patients for medicinal purposes. This resulted in the first versions of “rehab centers.” Like the methadone clinics of later decades, these facilities tried to break people’s morphine addiction by giving them heroin. Morphine addiction became a serious problem for many American soldiers during World War I. In 1923 the Supreme Court decided to make it illegal for doctors to prescribe heroin and morphine for any reason. Did government interference end the scourge of drug addiction in America? Of course not. All it did was make the trafficking of drugs go underground. And there was an organization in place ready, willing, and able to take up the slack and make billions over the remainder of the twentieth century. Enter the Mafia.

The Mafia and Drugs

There is evidence that some Mafia dons were unwilling to let their soldiers dabble in narcotics. Paul Castellano barred the Gambinos from dealing, though that did not stop John Gotti and his crew from trafficking in heroin. Buffalo don Stefano Magaddino wanted to give his soldiers a bigger cut of the profit to steer clear of drugs. But the allure of easy, and big, money was too much to avoid.

The Chinese Connection

Prior to the Mafia’s entrance into the drug business, most of the heroin consumed by America’s addicts came from China. A smaller supply came from the Middle East and the Corsican gangs in Marseilles, who would ultimately team up with the Mafia. During World War II this whole network was nearly broken by the fortunes of war. The fighting on land and sea in and around Europe and North Africa and Japan’s invasion of China effectively dismantled the source of the heroin’s manufacture and the trade routes over which the drug was shipped. Since the supply was not there, the demand diminished in the United States. Then the United States intelligence community made it possible for the Mafia to become extremely wealthy drug kingpins and flood the land with the addictive poison.