In one of Al Capone's most celebrated killing sprees, the mob chief personally dispatched three gangsters after a banquet given in their honor. Al had a surprise package opened that contained an Indian club and proceeded to beat their brains out. The matter of disposing of the bodies was left to Capone's favorite enforcer, Machine Gun Jack McGurn. Since Capone wanted the deaths of the trio well advertised, McGurn dumped them where they were sure to be found. Otherwise McGurn had his own private burial ground on some farmland in northern Indiana. Decades later Chicago gangsters still took sightseeing rides through the area to point it out to friends and talked openly of planting some additional corpses there; law enforcement agencies have generally assumed they did make use of Machine Gun Jack's private cemetery.
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Murder, Inc., had its own graveyard in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, in a chicken yard near the house of a brother-in-law of one of the assassination outfit's top gunners. Stool pigeon Abe Reles revealed the location, and the law, searching for the body of Peter Panto, a young anti-racketeer dockworker, launched a massive steam-shovel hunt. After several weeks of futile probing, a steam shovel hit paydirt. A 600-pound lump of earth, clay, rock and the everpresent quicklime was found. The pile was too fragile to pull apart, but X rays of the mass revealed an almost complete skeleton of one body and parts of another. The skeleton was believed to be Panto's, but positive identification was not made. In this particular case it did not matter, the death-penalty law in effect at the time in New York provided for execution of kidnappers, unless the victim was returned alive before the start of the abductors' trial. A corpus delicti was not necessary.
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Planting bodies in burial grounds was generally done when there was a need to hide the fact that a murder had been committed. In Panto's case it was generally known that his only enemies were waterfront mobsters and simply depositing his corpse in a gutter would put the heat on them. Having Panto "disappear" made the caseto some extent, at leastan enigma.
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Burial grounds are still used since they are deemed more permanent than a water grave for unwanted corpses. Such stiffs, no matter how weighted down, have a disturbing habit of floating to the surface. As the mobs became more intimately involved in construction rackets, foundations and cement roadways have become very popular burial sites. There is, to mobsters, something inspiring about planting a victim under a high-rise. "Sort of like a real tombstone," one gangster told police.
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Business Penetration by Mafia
For years the claim has been made that the Mafia is going legit. The crime families' take from gambling, narcotics, loan-sharking and labor rackets, to name a few of their major income sectors, has stayed about even in recent years, the argument goes, and so has opened the need for expansion into more honest enterprises. Thus it is known that one crime family owns real estate valued at well over $200 million, while another controls a major hotel chain. New York mafiosi are said to be part owners of several of the city's skyscrapers.
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In the 1950s the Kefauver Committee determined that syndicate figures were involved in "approximately 50 areas of business enterprise." Among them, alphabetically, were advertising, appliances, automobile industry, banking, coal, construction, drug stores and drug companies, electrical equipment, florists, food, garment industry, import-export, insurance, liquor industry, news services, newspapers, oil industry, paper products, radio stations, ranching, real estate, restaurants, scrap, shipping, steel, television, theaters and transportation.
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Although the mobsters' moves into such enterprises may seem motivated by a desire to go legit, it is easy, upon closer consideration, to suspect ulterior motives. For example, although they flocked to Las Vegas for legal gambling in the 1940s, they thereafter derived several dishonest dollars for every honest one they extracted from such operations.
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And, what was the Gambino family's real interest when they penetrated one of the largest furniture firms in the country? Ettore Zappi, identified by the McClellan subcommittee as a capodecina (captain) of the Gambinos, joined the firm in a minor executive position in New York and later proposed to management that he set up a separate corporation which alone would supply all the company's mattresses. The company brass found the idea attractive, thinking they could dictate price and production standards and yet be free of actually manufacturing the mattresses or paying competitive prices. However, with Zappi's contract came a sole supplier agreement; the furniture company was boxed in since it depended entirely on the new firm for its mattresses. If it couldn't get them, the furniture firm was as good as out of business.
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And, in terms of getting the mattresses, they had to be shipped from the mattress maker to the furniture firm's plant. Suddenly an exclusive franchise was awarded to a new trucking firmmore mafiosi going legitorganized by the Gambinos. The trucking firm was in turn tied to a Teamsters local, also by coincidence with close ties to the Gambino family. Going legit or not, the Gambinos came out of the deal with two sweetheart franchises, employment for many family members and a strengthened grip on union affiliations.
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An added fillip for the mob's move into legitimate business is that the investment can never go wrong.
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