already turning into a slum area. When Frank was 14 he robbed the landlady of his parents' flat, wearing a black handkerchief over his face as a mask. The landlady nevertheless recognized him and informed the police. Frank made up an alibi that was accepted by the police, and he beat the rap. In 1908 and 1912, he was charged with assault and robbery but was discharged on both occasions. Frank's brother Eddie, 10 years his senior, was engaged in gang activities, and he brought Frank into the fold. At 24, Costello was sentenced to a year in prison for carrying a gun. He was not to return to prison for the next 37 years.
|
In the early days of Prohibition, his best friends were Lucky Luciano, a Sicilian, and Meyer Lansky, a Polish Jew. Costello never seemed particularly bigoted about crime, possibly because his hatred for his father diminished any bias he may have had about the values of the "old country" Italians. The trio were to become the most important figures in the formation of the national crime syndicate during the 1930s. While Luciano and Lansky took care of organizing criminal outfits, Costello developed contacts and influence among the police and politicians. As the eldest of the trio, Costello had the maturity to impress those to be bribed.
|
By the mid-1920s the trio's various criminal enterprises were making them very rich. To protect their interests, they were paying, according to statements attributed to Luciano, $10,000 a week in "grease" directly into the police commissioner's office. Later, during the regimes of commissioners Joseph A. Warren and Grover A. Whalen, the amount was said to have doubled. In 1929, just after the stock market crash, Costello told Luciano he had to advance Whalen $30,000 to cover his margin calls in the market. "What could I do?" Costello told Luciano. ''I hadda give it to him. We own him." It never occurred to his partnersand later on to other members of the crime syndicateto question Costello on how he dispensed mob money. Costello was regarded as a man of honor on such matters. Besides, the results were there to see, with cases never brought to court, complaints dropped, sentences fixed, and so on.
|
Costello became a vital cog in the national crime syndicate, which could not operate successfully without protection. The gangs cooperated and Costello supplied the protection. As part of his reward, Costello got the rights to gambling in the lucrative Louisiana market, where Huey Long was entrenched, hands wide open. And he was hailed by all the crime family heads as the "Prime Minister of the Underworld," the man who dealt with the "foreign dignitaries"the police, judges and politicos.
|
Costello is generally credited with neutralizing. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. For years and years, Hoover maintained that there was no Mafia and no organized crime in America. Costello helped keep it that way, not through bribery, but rather through a simple form of "stroking." The FBI chief was an inveterate horse-player, a big gambler who claimed never to bet more than $2 a race but used FBI agents to scurry off to make bets for him at the $100 window. Through Frank Erickson, the syndicate's top bookmaker, Costello would learn when a "hot horse" was running (in Mafia parlance, a hot horse does not mean one with a good chance of winning, but a
sure thing
) and he would pass the word to columnist Walter Winchell, a mutual friend of both Costello and Hoover. Winchell slipped it to Hoover, and there is considerable evidence from FBI agents about how pleasant Hoover could be after he had a satisfactory day at the track. (There is ample evidence from FBI and Winchell staffers of Hoover's horse betting and of Erickson-Constello-Winchell tips to the FBI head.)
|
And what was Hoover's attitude toward bookmaking and gambling, which with the repeal of Prohibition became the chief source of income for the national syndicate? "The FBI," Hoover declared, "has much more important functions to accomplish than arresting gamblers all over the country."
|
In such a cozy arrangement Costello and Hoover lived happily ever after, and the Mafia and organized crime continued to grow.
|
Costello groupies from the press and admirers have tried to whitewash Costello by noting that he was not a murderer. But he did sit in on all syndicate decisions concerning major hits. If he was at times a moderating force (too much bloodletting complicated his bribery activities), he did join in on murder plots. Within the underworld, Costello is generally credited with being the man who saw to it that Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, the "canary" in the Murder, Inc., exposures, stopped talking, permanently. Among those so stating have been Luciano, Lansky, and another leading Jewish mobster, Doc Stacher. As Stacher put it in an interview with journalists in the 1970s:
|
 | | ...
he got to work and found out which room Reles was in at the Half Moon [the Coney Island hotel where Reles was being kept under protective custody]not so bard because the cops had a round-the clock guard on it. But then Frank really showed his muscleú He knew so many top-ranking cops that he got the names of the detectives who were guarding Reles. We never asked exactly bow Costello did it, but one evening be came back with a smile and said, "It's cost us a hundred grand, but Kid Twist Reles is about to join his maker."
|
|
