The Mafia Encyclopedia (13 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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was only convicted of one crime, the illegal acquisition of 300,000 pounds of sugar in 1946.
After the conviction, Barbara became a beer and soft drink distributor, holding important and exclusive upstate New York franchises, acquired, no doubt, through offers that certain parties could not refuse. After the 1956 national meeting, Barbara suffered a heart attack, and in fact virtually all the mobsters caught at the 1957 Apalachin Conference insisted they had just happened to drop in to pay a visit to a sick friend. It was the merest coincidence, apparently, that all the boys happened to be struck by the same idea at the same time.
While some matters on the agenda for the conference became known, the full story of Apalachin '57 has been shrouded in mystery. Barbara was of little help, insisting he was much too ill to testify. The State Investigation Commission sent its own heart specialist to examine Barbara, and in May 1959 a state supreme court justice ordered him to testify before the commission. Of course, claims of illness by mafiosi always produce two sets of medical men, each with different assessments. In Barbara's case, he proved his doctor correct. A month later he dropped dead of a heart attack.
After the '57 fiasco, Barbara vacated his Apalachin mansion, now too prominent for a residence. In fact, the 58-acre estate was sold for conversion into a tourist attraction, presumably into some form of Mafia Disneyland. Nothing came of the idea.
See also:
Apalachin Conference
.
Barnes, Leroy "Nicky" (1933): Harlem narcotics king
In the words of one New York reporter, Leroy Barnes is "a sort of Muhammed Ali of crime, or even better the black man's Al Capone."
Born to a poor family in Harlem in 1933, Leroy "Nicky" Barnes was for a time the king of Harlem, the first boss of the "Black Mafia," if the term is correctly understood. The
New York Times Magazine
profiled him thusly: "Checking in at Shalimar, the Gold Lounge, or Smalls ... he will be bowed to, nodded to, but not touched.'' The juke seemed to always be playing "Baaad, Baaad Leroy Brown," which, according to Barnes's fans, was written specifically for him. "It's like the Godfather movie,'' said a New York police detective of Barnes wading through mobs of admirers, "being treated like the goddamn Pope."
During his heyday, many writers, the present one included, felt Barnes characterized a shift in organized crime leadership to the newer ghetto minorities. But as it turned out, while Barnes became a multimillionaire and was lionized by fellow blacks as "taking over" the mob, he was really no more effective than other ghetto criminals, ultimately capable of exploiting only his own kind. Far from taking over from the Mafia, he was used by it, playing the typical role of ghetto criminals, that of visible kingpin of the street racketsin Barnes's case, the drug racket. He was indeed king of the Harlem narcotics distributors, but little more.
Drug kingpin Leroy "Nicky" Barnes
cut a romantic Figure in Harlem before
he was sent to prison for life. Mafiosi
with whom he cooperated missed him
deeply, having lost the opportunity to
insist the Black Mafia "have taken
over and we couldn't run drugs
anymore even if we wanted to."
Barnes's success was mainly due to his alliance with Crazy Joey Gallo, a maverick of the Mafia whom he had met in New York's Green Haven Prison. Barnes was serving a narcotics violations sentence, Gallo doing time for extortion. In his past, Gallo handled or knew of the modus operandi in the mob's dealing with Harlem pushers. He showed Barnes how to achieve dominance in the field and so make himself vital to the mob. It was said that when Gallo was released, the pair agreed to work together. With Gallo's help, Barnes
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would gain access to large amounts of heroin shipped directly from Italian sources while Barnes, in return, would supply black "troops" to Gallo when he needed them. In time Barnes was the chief distributor of narcotics in black ghetto areas, not only in New York City, but also in upstate New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Nicky Barnes became more than rich; he became "flamboyantly" rich. He was a walking bank, always with an impressive bankroll on him. During one of his arrests, $130,000 was found in the trunk of his automobile. He had a Mercedes Benz and a Citroen Maserati, and the police themselves admitted they had no idea how many Cadillacs, Lincoln Continentals and Thunderbirds Barnes also owned. Barnes maintained several apartments in Manhattan, plus one in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and at least two in New Jersey.
Although Barnes lived an openly lavish life, he beat the government on its reliable tax evasion gambitBarnes paid taxes on a quarter of a million dollars in annual "miscellaneous income." The IRS insisted Barnes owed a lot more, but substantiating that was no easy matter. In fact, Barnes seemed more or less immune to prosecution. Although he sported 13 arrests, they all led to only one sentence, a short one, behind bars (where he met Gallo). It was this record that made Barnes a cult figure in Harlem and other black communities. "Sure, that's the reason the kids loved the guy and wanted to be like him," a federal narcotics agent told a newsweekly. "Mr. Untouchablethat's what they called himwas rich, but he was smart, too, and sassy about it. The bastard loved to make us cops look like idiots."
Eventually in 1978 Nicky Barnes fell, thanks to a federal narcotics strike force. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and fined $123,000. Behind bars Barnes found his life less than rewarding. In recent years he has started talking to authorities, handing them his confederates in his drug empire in an effort to win his freedom eventually. What he delivered was about a dozen blacks, men who he said were cheating him of his women and the money he had left behind. But that was all Barnes had to offer. What of his vaunted distribution setup, direct to Sicily, if you will? Barnes could offer nothing because he never had it. Mafiosi control the drug supplies. They delivered to Barnes and then he operated as little more than a high-priced pusher. Barnes was so insulated from the rest of the operation that he could offer the government little about the flow of narcotics. After Barnes's departure the drug racket continued to flourish in the black ghettos; distributors, small, medium and large, remained a dime a dozen for the Mafia.
Not that the mob did not miss Leroy. He had been so valuable to them. They could say "the niggers have taken over ... We couldn't run drugs anymore even if we wanted to." Clearly the best friend the so-called Black Mafia ever had has been and continues to be the Italian-American model.
See also:
Black Mafia
.
Barrel Murder: Early mafioso execution method
Barrel murderwherein a corpse was deposited in a barrel and abandonedcame into vogue in this country in the 1870s, especially in New Orleans and New York where the first waves of Italian emigration washed ashore. It was the outbreak of such crimes, in which the victim invariably was an Italian, that first led American authorities to announce the presence of the Mafia in this country.
The barrel was deposited in the ocean if the corpse was not meant to be found or else, rather perversely, shipped off by rail to some distant cityand a nonexistent address. In other cases the barrel was simply left in a vacant lot or even on a street corner. This was often done if the purpose of the killing was to carry out a Black Hand murder threat and thus advertise the slaughtering abilities of such extortionists.
The leading exponents of barrel murder were Lupo the Wolf (Ignazio Saietta) and the Morello family, a homicidal pack of cutthroats, brothers, half-brothers and brothers-in-law, from Corleone, Sicily. Together they were believed to have slaughtered and barreled at least 100 victims over three decades.
Eventually the power of the Morellos and of Lupo, who went to prison, was broken and the mobs stopped utilizing the barrel technique, mainly because it so clearly established the crime as a mob job.
Possibly almost as troubling was the fact that many freelance killers started using the technique in an effort to shift the blame for their acts on the Mafia. Oddly, the technique was revived in 1976 when 71-year-old Johnny Roselli, involved along with Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana in the CIA-underworld plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, was murdered and his body stuffed into a 55-gallon oil drum and dumped into waters off Florida. The drum eventually floated to shore despite the holes punched in its sides and heavy chains weighing it down. Of course, any near-competent hit man should have predicted that gases produced by the body's decomposition would lift the grisly drum to the surface.
Sources in the underworld also pointed out that the barrel technique had long been abandoned, but whoever had disposed of Roselli's body in this fashion either did not know that or perhaps was simply using it as an expedient to label it a mob job. Since the Roselli murder remains unsolved, the possibility cannot be
Page 30
excluded that this method of victim disposal might well have been used to make a mob job look like a CIA job.
Basile, Tobia (c. 1809?): Camorra's grand old man
The grand old man of the Camorra, the Neapolitan criminal society, Tobia Basile trained many erstwhile Camorristas who ended up as important members of the American underworld. A seasoned criminal when he first entered prison in Italy in 1860, Basile was to remain behind bars for the next 30 years, there to become Italy's greatest crime teacher, instructing numerous eager inmates in the ways and deeds of the Camorra.
The Italian sociologist G. Alongi, a 19th-century expert on the Camorra, made a detailed study of Basile. He wrote:
His numerous pupils used to go to his lessons regularly to listen to his advice, to learn from him the science of "prudence in crime" for be was a walking encyclopedia on the art of the mala vita. His long stay in the penitentiary, his cold and reflective temperament, his cleverness, and his venerable age made him a muchheeded master. For a few cents he would teach the art of stealing from a puppet entirely covered with numberless tiny bells that would jingle at the slightest touch; he taught the tradition of the Honorable Society and the chief rules to be observed in order to conform to its spirit, the art of dealing a straight or a treacherous blow, the way of slipping along the floor without making any noise, the secrets of the Camorristic jargon, a quantity of methods successful in diverting the attention of the police, the way of behaving in the courts, and the numberless swindles committed against the emigrant who, coming from the provinces, stops a few days in Naples on his way to America. This extraordinary man was in possession of a complete outfit of false keys, files, and picklocks, and taught the aspirants all that was necessary to know before being initiated into the Honorable Society
.
When Basile was released from prison he was a shrunken old man well over 80 and he was, he felt, an old warhorse ready to be set out to graze. He wanted only to contemplate the world, to be consulted from time to time by other Camorristas, but above all to be free of cares. Unfortunately he had a wife who talked endlessly and nagged. It was not right that an honored Camorrista could not enjoy a peaceful retirement. Basile suffered 10 years of torment and then, suddenly, his wife disappeared in May 1900. Newspaper reporters made a big thing of it, wondering if some of Basile's old enemies were exacting vengeance. Not so, Basile insisted. His wife he said had been abducted "for ransom which a poor man like me doesn't have."
Basile grew more senile with the passing years, walking about Naples mumbling of honor and respect and the art of murder. One day Basile was seen packing his belongings onto a cart and then he was gone, never to be seen again.
Then in 1910 the Basile house was torn down by a new owner so that he could build anew. In the Basile bedroom, workers found a shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, whom Camorristas regarded as their special patron. It was removed to reveal a false wall. There behind the wall was the skeleton of Tobia Basile's wife. From the condition of the sealed compartment it was obvious that the woman had been walled up alive and had for many days screamed and tried to claw her way out of her brick and plaster tomb. The position of the bed indicated Basile had lain there with his head no more than two feet from the wall.
It had been the last crime of an honored member of the Camorra, asserting his right to the respect of others.
See also:
Camorra
.
Batista, Fulgencio (19011973): Cuban dictator and Meyer Lansky partner
When at 2:30
A.M.
, New Year's Day 1959, Fulgencio Batista, the dictator of Cuba, arrived at Camp Columbia outside Havana with seven carloads of armed guards, it marked the end of the game for him and the American underworld in Cuba. It is not known how many millions of dollars Batista and several of his cronies took with themafter they had already shipped a huge amount of wealth to Swiss banks. Considerately, however, before coming to the airfield, Batista had been on the phone, telling the chosen few that Castro had won, that the rebels would soon take possession of the capital. But Batista's most important call did not go to a fellow Cuban. It went to Polish Jew Maier Suchowljanskybetter known as Meyer Lanskyeasily at the time the most important gangster in America. And in Cuba, for that matter.
Lansky followed Batista out of the country within a matter of hours, although he did leave representatives at his casino enterprises to see if Castro would be interested in the same financial setup Lansky had provided Batista. Castro's answer was to throw them in jail for a time before kicking them out of the country. Celebrating the demise of the Batista regime, the Cuban populace went on a slot-machine smashing rampage. It might not have been on a par with the storming of the Winter Palace or Versailles, but for Lansky and the American mob the result was devastating.

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