The Mafia Encyclopedia (36 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 95
John Gotti. The Gambinos had a rock-solid grip on the necessary construction unions in the greater New York area. As a result construction costs in New York were and are the highest in the country.
The Gambinos did not control the concrete racket alone. It was a cooperative setup run by four New York families, the others being the Genovese, Colombo and Lucchese families. Only the Bonannos were excluded, for being a most troublesome group and at the time removed as a member of the commission.
The racket worked through the establishment of what the mobs called "the club," a network of mafiosi, union officials and contractors in on the scam. If a contractor wanted any kind of work done, he had to clear it with the mob or their crooked union accomplices. A contractor might need cement trucks to deliver cement for a foundation to be poured; he had to pay off. Otherwise the dement mixers just didn't show up and the contractor had a very expensive hole in the ground. If he needed I beams, he didn't get them without paying, or he'd have a crane and crew drawing wages to do nothing. And frequently he had to pay for mob-connected guys on site doing nothing more laborious than drawing a paycheck.
The concrete payoffs could be very big and brilliantly organized by "the club." The mob selected a total of six firms that could do the concrete work. No other contractor could even bid. Even if an outsider won the job the mob would see to it he got no cement, no girders, nothing. The six firms could bid for any job. The mob did not care who won, but the winning contractor had to pay them 2 percent.
As the State Organized Crime Task Force reported, "On all concrete pouring contracts up to two million dollars, the Colombo family extorted a one percent kickback. Contracts from two to fifteen million dollars were reserved for a 'club' of contractors selected by the Commission. These contractors were required to kick back two percent of the contract price to the Commission," whose members would split the revenues four ways. On a $2 million job the four families thus would cut up $200,000 or $50,000 apiece. On juicier jobs of $10 to $15 million the payoff was all the bigger.
Technically the concrete racket belonged to the Colombos, but the bigger outfits muscled in on the major deals. To keep the Colombos from becoming too embittered, the commission decreed they could keep the revenues from all deals less than $2 million, and they could offer the deals to other contractors as well at the bargain price of 1 percent. The commission regarded the arrangement as most magnanimous. The Colombos might not have agreed since they had started the whole scam, but they were not powerful enough to demand honor among thieves.
However, the biggest mob, the Gambinos, could actually hold up the other families when it came to their fair share. Castellano would set up his own deals on some contracts, with the extra "workmen" all from the Gambinos. And Castellano sometimes demanded and grabbed a bigger slice, such as 30 percent rather than the usual 25 percent. He once told his construction bagman: "We do things on our own. We gotta think of our own. Tell it to the fat guy. Tell Chin." Castellano was thus sticking it to the Genovese family. The fat guy was Genovese boss "Fat Tony" Salerno and the Chin was his tough underboss, Vinnie ''The Chin" Gigante.
Castellano's bagman, Alphonse "Funzi" Mosca, observed, "It might get a little raw."
Castellano's taped response: "It does, it does. What are they gonna do, sue me?"
There is no indication that the Genovese family did anything to queer the deal. Later, when Gigante became the Genovese boss and Gotti seized control of the Gambinos, Chin tried to rub out Gotti. He feared that Gotti would move into the Genovese construction rackets in New Jersey.
There was always big money in concrete, and partners could be nice, but having no partners was even nicer.
Connected Guys: See Wise Guys and Connected Guys.
Consigliere: Mafia "adviser"
Probably one of the most nonsensical "revelations" made about the Mafia or Cosa Nostra concerns the supposed role of the
consigliere
. We are told this councilor does all sorts of wondrous criminal things for the mob. It is true that many crime families, but not all, do have the post of consigliere, with differing duties and virtually always of a low-order priority. But if there is anyone within a crime family who has the boss's ear, it is probably not the consigliere but rather the underboss, the number two man in the mob. He generally functions as a kind of chief executive officer, supervises many family operations and sees to it that the orders of the family head are carried out.
The consigliere, often misunderstood to be the chief adviser to the don, his super planner, is a figurehead power, a sort of public relations gimmick invented by Lucky Luciano when he came to power in the early 1930s and organized the national crime syndicate. Luciano, in an attempt to establish peace within the organization, knew most trouble started with underlings either trying to get ahead or reacting to real or
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imaginary mistreatment. He ordered each crime family to establish the post of consigliere, a neutral middleman who would settle disputes within the family and act as a negotiator with the other families in disputes such as over territories.
Luciano also announced that the consigliere would act as a hearing officer, one who would have to clear any plan to knock off a Mafia member. If the consigliere after hearing the evidence decided the would-be victim was getting a bad rap, he could forbid the hit. This was to give the lower-rank members a sense of protection from the unjust acts of a family boss or any of his capos.
Luciano's fairness initiative might well be considered sheer flimflammery. Since Luciano's day to the present, there is no case on record of a consigliere ruling against the edicts of a boss or other superior. To do so would be inviting the death penalty for the consigliere. Even in those cases when a consigliere is allowed to rule on a matter with no interference from above, his decision as often as not ends up either being family-aligned or ignored.
If the consigliere was the brain trust of Mafia legend, it would follow that somewhere along the line a consigliere would have become a boss, perhaps even by the use of cunning force. Yet a run through a roster of consiglieres among the New York families or any other crime family (not always an easy matter since the post is so insignificant that law enforcement agencies often disagree on who holds the post in a particular family) indicates none of the ilk even near top status.
Though more glamorous in books and movies, the consigliere job is most likely dead-end. A better road to advancement lies in doing duty as a chauffeur.
See also:
Chauffeurs
.
Contract: Murder assignment
It is not accidental that a mob killing is called a contract because murders are, in fact, strictly business matters. And in business, subtlety is often good policy; the use of code words and the method by which the orders are given tend to insulate the man who gives the order.
The mafioso method of contract killing is essentially the same as the formula set forth for Murder, Incorporated, in the 1930s. One of the most knowledgeable reporters on crime, Meyer Berger of the
New York Times
, once explained the technique that came about "when the head men from different cities met and agreed to adopt new rules for the conduct of murder under a loosely formed national syndicate."
He said, "Murder is not the Combination's business. It does no murder for outsiders and no killing for a fee. Indeed, its revised rules sharply restrict the use of homicide to business needs and have probably reduced rather than increased the total number of U.S. murders committed annually. The new handbook sternly forbids murder for personal or romantic reasons, or even for revenge. Executive heads of the Combination debate each murder before causing it to occur, much as a Wall Street syndicate might discuss a maneuver in the stock market." By and large these rules were adhered to (although certainly the murder-happy Vito Genovese had killings done for each of the taboo reasonsfor personal reasons, for revenge and even for matters of the heart).
Once a contract is ordered, the wheels are set in motion to guarantee protection for the party ordering the execution. He is isolated from the trigger man, never saying a word to him about the job. First the contract is passed to a second party. This party alone assigns the hit man or killer. In fact, very often even this party will pass the order on to yet another party. Since all negotiations are handled on a one-to-one basis, it does not matter if eventually someone in the line of command talks. What is missing is the vital corroborative witness who knows the complete case.
The actual assassins are simply given the identity of the victim, background on his habits and a place where he can most likely be found. Sometimes they are given a spotter or fingerman who points out the victim. Once the murder is finished, the killers vanish, notifying no one except the person who had given the specific orders. The information could be relayed up the line if necessary but essentially what the police are left with is a killing with no clues and no likely suspects because very often the killers do not even know their victim. Often the conduit between top mob bosses and Murder, Inc., was the organization's chief executioner, Albert Anastasia.
When Anastasia himself was murdered in 1957, the execution followed the same Murder, Inc., rules. Although there were no arrests in the case, it is known that the order originated with Vito Genovese who passed it on to Carlo Gambino who relayed it to Joe Profaci who assigned it to the murderous Gallo brothers, who may have carried out the murder themselves or passed it on one more step to the actual gunners.
Clearly, as some reporters at the time noted, Anastasia himself would have approved of the way his murder was handled. Authorities often eventually learn the details of a great many contract killings through informers, among them such classic characters as Abe Reles, Joe Valachi, Vinnie Teresa and Jimmy Fratianno, but almost never do they get a conviction. As can best be determined the conviction rate in contract murders runs about one-tenth of 1 percent.
Coonan, Jimmy (1946- ): Boss of the Westies
Some would say that Jimmy Coonan was a throwback to the old-time Irish hoodlums who once ravaged New
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York. But wild as he was, Coonan also solidified, by cunning, deception, deceit and sheer effrontery, a renewed tie with the Mafia that had first been forged decades earlier by Owney Madden and Lucky Luciano. This new alliance held until the 1980s when it was shattered by the vicious nature of the Westies themselves, and Coonan in particular.
With a tight hold on the Westies' stronghold of Hell's Kitchen, the west side of Manhattan along the Hudson River, Coonan climbed to the top as the meanest and most brutal Irish hood in recent decades, cementing his power while still in his 20s. A blue-eyed former choirboy, Jimmy could be among the most affable of gangsters, whose ranks he joined at age 17. Unfortunately no one could predict when his explosive temper would lead to an outbreak of violence.
His vicious nature made him a brute among brutes, and with only a couple of dozen supporters he formed the Westies gang and destroyed other mobster groupings in the area. The Westies gained strangleholds on a number of rackets in their domain, including loansharking, drug distribution, numbers, counterfeiting, labor racketeering, extortion and murder for hire.
Of course the most important murders involved guaranteeing the sanctity of their turf. It soon became a matter of Hell's Kitchen loreand fearhow the Westies dismembered their victims and disposed of the grisly remains. Coonan stressed his credo: "No corpus delicti, no crime, no police investigation." Rarely did even the tiniest part of any Westies victim ever turn up.
Under Coonan's supervision the corpses were chopped up. In a seminar on dismemberment, Coonan taught his boys, pointing out for example that severing an elbow was just about the toughest task. The cut-up jobs were done in bathtubs or in old-fashioned kitchen sinks with built-in tubs for laundry. The parts were placed in strong plastic garbage bags and taken to places of disposal. One favorite destination was a sewage plant on Ward's Island in the East River where a confederate working there was tipped handsomely for depositing the grim contents into the sewage being treated that day.
With a few exceptions the mafiosi left the Westies alone, feeling any effort to squash them would result in long bloody warfare since the Westies were incapable of foregoing vengeance for any bloodletting of their ranks.
The Westies, however, did not return the favor. They thought nothing of murdering mob guys who tried to establish themselves in Westie territory. They reverted to an old Irish gangster custom of kidnapping Mafia gangsters for ransom. The victims were released after the money was paidunless Jimmy Coonan had a whim to kill them anyway.
Actually Jimmy had a master plan. He wanted in to the Gambino family as a special adjunct, a goal achieved not through diplomacy but by demonstrating how much trouble the Westies could be.
Coonan's most daring caper was to murder a bigmoney mob loan shark named Ruby Stein. Stein did millions of dollars of business lending out money and was totally trusted by the Gambinos who bankrolled him. Ambushing Ruby Stein in a tavern, the Westies appropriated his black book, which listed all outstanding debtors. The Gambinos knew little about who was in the book, expecting Stein to handle all the business and refer them only to defaulters who needed extra pressure to pay up. Without Stein's black book, the Gambinos didn't know who owed them money. Jimmy Coonan did, and he collected from many of them.
The mob men suspected the Westies, but they lacked proof and were unwilling to risk gang warfare by pursuing the matter. Under Paul Castellano, who generally looked for a peaceful way to settle problems, it was decided that overtures should be made to the Westies, exactly what Coonan wanted. The mob would leave the Irish their rackets, taking only a 10 percent cut, and also give the Westies a piece of other Mafia rackets. Coonan looked like a great Irish patriot to his men. And Castellano was not displeased; he now had an extra troop of killers who strengthened his own position within his crime family and with other families as well.
Coonan and his boys handled a number of mob hits, and Jimmy constantly asked for more assignments. "We could use the dough," he explained. In fact, he didn't need the money, having by now accumulated millions, but it provided a cover for the Stein affair. Besides that, Coonan and the Westies truly thrived on hired rubouts, not only for the fee involved, but for the bonus of added cuts in certain enterprises.
The Westies passed from one Gambino handler to another, finally ending up under the supervision of a rising capo, John Gotti. When Coonan first met Gotti, he was much impressed and reported back to his followers: "I just met a greaseball tougher than we are." It was a high compliment indeed and solidified the relationship between the pair for the rest of Coonan's reign.
Eventually, Coonan became more and more restrained in dealing with his own men, and disputes flourished. The Westies reverted to their old custom of pulling unauthorized jobs and killings. And even worse they returned to victimizing one another. Perhaps to accommodate those chaffing at his ruleand to cool off murder plots against himselfJimmy sought to placate things by purging certain elements. He apparently took part in a plot to frame his No. 2, Mickey Featherstone, for a murder he had no part in. Featherstone could not believe Jimmy had betrayed him, and he finally turned informer to save himself.

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