The Mafia Encyclopedia (37 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 98
That proved to be the end for Jimmy Coonan and was one of the main reasons for Gotti's fall from power as well. Jimmy was convicted under the RICO (1970 Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act) statute and sentenced to 75 years. Gotti got life. But the pair's special relationship continued after a fashion. Both were sent into virtual solitary confinement in what mobsters consider a hellhole, Marion Federal Penitentiary, a prison with special space reserved for the toughest and meanest organized crime figures. They were prison mates but were destined never to see one another.
See also:
Westies
.
Coppola, Michael ''Trigger Mike" (1904-1966): Syndicate capo
Trigger Mike Coppola earned notoriety in Mafia and popular folklore. A raging sadist and brutal triggerman, his violent nature carried over to his personal life. Allegedly, he arranged to have his first wife murdered in the hospital where she had given birth. Fear of Coppola and his mob's vengeance drove his second wife to suicide. In Florida, after Mike's death, locals for years pointed out the old Coppola house. Haunted, they said. The tale ran that Wife No. 2's ghost was searching for the millions Trigger Mike was known to have squirreled away.
When Lucky Luciano went to prison in the 1930s and Vito Genovese fled to Europe to avoid a murder rap, Coppola had taken over much of the New York crime family's rackets, including the lucrative artichoke racket. He also ran much of the crime family's numbers operation in Harlem. His net was estimated at around $1 million a yearnot bad for a man with little on the ball other than a penchant for violence.
Sometimes Coppola had trouble keeping track of all the money coming his way. In 1960 Coppola became one of the first 11 undesirables listed in the Black Book issued by Nevada state officials. All eleven were barred from the casinos; in Coppola's case it was like keeping him from visiting his money. An oft-told underworld story concerns the time he woke up in the middle of the night suddenly recalling that he had forgotten a package in the freezer of one of his favorite night spots. A hurried phone call brought delivery of the package to his door and a sweating Coppola spent the rest of the night thawing out $219,000 of mob money, which he had charge of distributing the following morning.
One need not speculate what Coppola would have done had the money been gone. He would simply have killed off a few employees at the joint and blamed them for taking the money. Coppola was always ready to kill almost anybody to advance his fortunes or protect himself. His first wife, according to the subsequent testimony of his second wife, Ann, happened to be around when her husband and another hood discussed plans for the murder of a New York Republican political worker, Joseph Scottoriggio. The first Mrs. Coppola had been called to testify against her husband in the case, but her appearance was postponed because of her pregnancy. She gave birth to a baby daughter and then conveniently expired in her hospital bed. Coppola's second wife, Ann, later charged that Trigger Mike had bragged about killing Wife No. 1 to keep her from talking.
Ann Coppola was to learn that marriage to Trigger Mike was a living hell and that his first wife was probably better off dead. At their honeymoon party Coppola entertained the guests by taking a shot at Ann. When she became pregnant, Coppola called in a mob doctor to perform an abortion on the kitchen table with Trigger Mike helping out. He was to help out on three more abortions; Ann realized he got kicks out of it. In 1960 Ann discovered her husband was supplying drugs to her teenage daughter by a previous marriage. She filed for divorce and testified in an income tax case against Coppola, who sent strongarm men to kidnap her and admin-
Mafioso Mike Coppola and his First wife in
happier moments, before he allegedly had her
killed in the hospital where she had given birth
to a baby daughter. She could, it was said,
link Coppola to a murder.
Page 99
ister a harsh Mafia beating. Found severely mauled on an isolated beach, she recovered and prepared again to testify against him.
Finally, Trigger Mike threw in the towel and pleaded guilty, taking the fall as the mob ordered. The mob had decided they didn't want their racket secret revealed in open court. Trigger Mike served a year in Atlanta Penitentiary and then was put on an additional four-years probation.
Meanwhile, Ann had squirreled away something like a quarter million dollars in underworld money and secretly fled to Europe to escape the mob's hit men. In 1962, in Rome, she would run no more. She wrote a final letter to Internal Revenue, addressing certain portions of it to Attorney General Robert E Kennedy. Then she wrote a farewell to Trigger Mike, saying: "Mike Coppola, someday, somehow, a person or God or the law shall catch up with you, you yellow-bellied bastard. You are the lowest and biggest coward I have had the misfortune to meet." Then she wrote in lipstick on the wall over her hotel bed: "I have always suffered, I am going to kill myself. Forget me." She took a dozen sleeping pills and lapsed quietly into death.
Trigger Mike got out of prison in 1963 and he spent his remaining years in disgrace with the mob, both for letting his wife learn his secrets and for being unable to keep her mouth shut. Trigger Mike whiled away his time growing orchids. He might well have been disturbed in even that pursuit had Ann Coppola's last request been honored. She wanted to be cremated and her ashes dropped over his house.
Corallo, Anthony "Tony Ducks" (1913- ): Lucchese crime family boss
Admiring mafiosi dubbed Anthony Corallo "Tony Ducks" because he was successful for so many years in "ducking'' convictions. Later, the bloom would come off his sparkling record.
Born in 1913, Corallo grew up in a tough East Harlem neighborhood. His rap sheet dates to 1929 when he was arrested on a grand larceny charge. Early on, as a member of the Gagliano family, the Lucchese predecessor, he got six months in prison after police linked him to a cache of narcotics worth $150,000. After that Corallo shifted more to union activities and gained control of several union locals, the most important of which was Local 239 of the Teamsters in New York City. In 1958 a report of the McClellan Committee stated: "Our study into the New York phony local situation revealed an alarming picture of the extent to which gangsters led by John Dioguardi [Johnny Dio] and Anthony (Tony Ducks) Corallo infiltrated the labor movement in the nation's largest city, using their union positions for purposes of extortion, bribery, and shakedowns. The fact that one of the nation's most powerful labor leaders, James R. Hoffa, the international president of the Teamsters, used Dioguardi and Corallo in his efforts to capture control of the union in New York City only serves to underline the importance of gangster infiltration in the labor movement."
Anthony Corallo, boss of the Lucchese crime Family
in the 1970s and 1980s, was nicknamed "Tony Ducks"
long ago by gangsters For his success in "ducking" convictions.
It was a reputation that hasn't held up in recent years.
Evidence indicated that Corallo had siphoned of $69,000 from Local 239 funds by listing dummies on the payroll. He invoke the Fifth Amendment 83 times before the committee, and answered no questions about a court-authorized bugging of a New York apartment in which Hoffa was heard giving what appeared to be approval for Corallo to loot union funds provided he didn't get caught.
In 1962 Corallo was hit with a two-year sentence for paying a bribe of $35,000 to New York Supreme Court Justice James Vincent Keogh and Assistant U.S. Attorney Elliott Kahaner in an effort to get a light sentence for a Corallo associate. Later on in the 1960s Corallo
Page 100
got four and one-half years for conspiring to bribe former New York City Water Commissioner James L. Marcus who was in deep financial trouble and agreed to cash payments from Corallo in exchange for certain emergency cleaning contracts to be awarded to a party named by the mobster. The first such contract was for $835,000.
Also implicated in the case, which later expanded a planned shakedown of the Consolidated Edison utility company was ex-Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio. Marcus as commissioner of the Department of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity had iron-listed power over permits Consolidated Edison needed. DeSapio was to act as contact man with certain representatives of the utility. Marcus testified on the Consolidated Edison plothe got 15 months for the reservoir conspiracywhich the conspirators figured could involve millions of dollars. Marcus said the pressures put on him were so intense that at times he considered suicide. Eventually DeSapio and Corallo were convicted and the former Tammany Hall leader got a two-year prison term.
In the 1980s Corallo was facing charges of bidrigging schemes concerning garbage disposals on New York's Long Island and involving political figures "on both sides of the aisle." Then there were federal charges that Corallo was a member of the national commission of the Mafia. Part of the government's case came from a sophisticated bug placed in a Jaguar in which Corallo was often driven. It was said that other mafiosi both in the Lucchese and especially in the other crime families were upset not only that Corallo had been so careless as to let the bug go undetected but also by what he had said disparagingly about other Mafia men.
Immediately following the December 1985 assassination of Gambino family boss Paul Castellano, there was considerable word out of the underworld that Corallo could also be in very serious trouble. In fact, it appeared that in the late 1980s Corallo would really be "ducking" for his life. In 1986, he was sentenced to 100 years for being a member of the commission.
See also:
Lucchese Crime Family
.
Corleone, Sicily: Mafia spawning ground
It is fitting that the crime family boss in Mario Puzo's
The Godfather
is named Don Corleone, since that town in Sicily has long been regarded as one of the hotbeds of the Mafia and, for many years, one of the main suppliers of Mafia manpower to the United States.
Many of today's mobsters, especially in the New York-New Jersey area, trace their roots back to Corleone. As a matter of historical dispute it might be said that the west coast town of Castellammare del Golfo may have produced more big-time American mafiosi but for sheer numbers Corleone remains unmatched.
A once-prosperous town with a modern population of 18,000, Corleone was virtually denuded of male inhabitants through various Mafia wars. In the period between 1944 and 1948 the town suffered 153 Mafia murders. Estimates at various times placed the number of the town's adult males who had been convicted of crimes and were serving prison sentences or awaiting sentencing at upwards of 80 percent; in recent years working-age males have made up only 10 percent of the population.
Among the Corleonians who transferred to America were such worthies as the murderous Lupo the Wolf (Ignazio Saietta), Ciro Terranova and the Morello family, a huge band of brothers, half-brothers and brothers-in-law who were so numerous that they composed a "crime family" on their own. Antonio Morello, the eldest brother in this nuclear family, was described by police as being responsible for between 30 and 40 murders on his own, and Joe Morello was for a time regarded the Mafia boss of New York City.
Cosa Nostra
It is remarkable to consider that, until the appearance of Joe Valachi as an informer in 1963, the public had never heard of the term
Cosa Nostra
. Even the exhaustive Kefauver hearings of about a decade earlier had failed to uncover the term. And though seemingly a household expression today, crime family circles outside New York seemed to have had no knowledge of the term
Cosa Nostra
. In Buffalo the crime family was called "the Arm," in Chicago "the Outfit," in New England "the Office."
When and where, then, Cosa Nostra? Valachi didn't invent the term, but it was carefully nurtured by federal authorities in reviews of his testimony. In a literal sense, it means nothing more than "our thing." But for FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover who insisted for decades that there was no such thing as organized crime or the Mafia,
Cosa Nostra
meant "save face." Says crime historian Richard Hammer, "In order to get Hoover off the hook, a new name had to be created, hence Costa Nostra." This allowed Hoover to say in effect, ''Oh, yes, we've always known about that."
Actually the FBI had been aware of the term in the previous year or two when it finally made efforts to probe Mafia business. All they had to go on were passing comments picked up in wiretaps and the like in which various mafiosi made comments in Italian about "cosa nostra," or "this thing of ours."
It was enough for the FBI, which attempted to carry its save-Hoover program even further by adding a
la
to the name so that it could offer the press a convenient

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