On July 1, 1928, Yale was driving along 44th Street in Brooklyn when a black sedan crowded him to the curb. Yale and his car were ventilated with a hail of bullets. The assassins abandoned the black Nash a few blocks away and vanished, leaving behind severa weapons, including two .45-caliber revolvers traced back to Miami and a Thompson submachine gun that proved to have come from a Chicago gun dealer named Peter yon Frantizius known to be a supplier of weapons to the Capone mob. It was the first time in New York that a machine gun, popular in Chicago, had been present during a killing.
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They gave Frankie Yale a spectacular funeral, the biggest and best any gangster had gotten in New York. It was in line with Yale's wishes. He had been very impressed with the funeral Dion O'Banion had gotten in Chicago, and he had always said he wanted one that would surpass it. That was no easy task; after all, music for O'Banion's funeral was provided by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Still they did Yale up proud. The funeral cost more than $50,000 in 1928 dollars. He had a $15,000 nickel-and-silver coffin and flower stores were denuded of blooms to provide 38 carloads of flowers. Flags flew at half-staff and 250 cars followed through the streets of Brooklyn to Yale's resting place at Holy Cross Cemetery. At least 10,000 mourners, spectators and police watched the show. Among them were two women who it developed were married to Yale; each declared she was the rightful Mrs. Yale.
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The
New York Daily News
rendered a final verdict, one that pacified local pride and would undoubtedly have pleased Yale himself. The newspaper declared the Yale funeral "was a better one than that given Dion O'Banion by Chicago racketeers in 1924."
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Youngbloods: Sam Giancana's American-raised Chicago mafiosi
They represented in the 1930s a new phase in syndicated crime in America, an example of the ethnic reinforcements available to the new national crime syndicate in the ghettos. Organized crime continued under the increasing dominance of Italian and Jewish ethnic groups, reversing a trend of just prior to World War I when the more typical ghetto experience was one of social mobility and so had lead to the breakdown of the large Jewish and Italian gangs, specifically the Monk Eastman and Paul Kelly gangs.
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These ethnic crime groupings revived under the bigmoney opportunities provided by Prohibition and so became America's first syndicate criminals, as distinguished from the more common ghetto criminals of the past. Young Turk elements began taking over the gangs, causing among the Italians, for example, a longterm bloody purging of the old-style, old-world mafiosi, replacing them with younger immigrants less "tainted" by the old crime rules and dominated by only one basic drivethe buck. Historically, a couple of decades should have been sufficient to move the ethnic Jewish and Italian gangs out of the ghettos and into a stratum of lower incidence of crime, even ethnic crime. But now the basically first-born ghetto youths were frozen into their locales by a second sociological force as powerful as Prohibition and its consequencesthe Great Depression.
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In the Chicago "Patch" area of the West Side, youth gangs saw only one future open to them after they passed the mindless age of juvenile crime. That future lay with the mob, the syndicate, the Caponeswhatever one wished to call it.
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The 42 Gang from the Patch spewed out a steady supply of mobsters-to-be, most prominent being Sam "Momo" Giancana, already at that age, to use a police description, "a snarling, sarcastic, ill-mannered, illtempered, sadistic psychopath." As Giancana moved up the syndicate ladder of success, he took with him a group of juvenile companions from the old 42 Gang who within the underworld became known as the "Youngbloods."
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The Youngbloods later included other 42 Gang members, but their nucleus formed around such Patch graduates as Sam Battaglia, Milwaukee Phil Alderisio, Marshall Caifano, Sam DeStefano, Fifi Buccieri, Willie Daddano, Frank Caruso, Charles Nicoletti and Rocco Petenza. By the 1950s the Youngbloods were the mainstays of the Chicago Outfit. Many of the older Capone hands, those who had survived the violence of the preceding decades, were now starting to fall away under the ravages of age, men like Golf Bag Hunt, Terry Druggan, Phil D'Andrea, Jake Guzik, Little New York Campagna, Frank Diamond and Claude Maddox.
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Even though Sam Giancana still took orders from the older hierarchyincluding Tony Accardo and Paul Ricca, the latter elevated to near sainthood within the mobthe Youngbloods were the main muscle in the organization. Giancana kept his Youngbloods close to him, not assigning many to capo status with many soldiers to supervise and "feed," but appointing them instead to an elite corps of buttonmen serving directly under him and carving out large slices of mob profits for themselves.
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The Youngblood reign lasted through the slow decline of Giancana in the late 1960s until his assassination in 1975. Within two years previous to that, Giancana had lost many of his most ardent Youngblood supporters. Men like Buccieri, Daddano and Battaglia
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