The Mafia Encyclopedia (86 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 245
As the Castellammarese War continued, it took on a third dimension. Luciano was cultivating younger gangsters on both sides with his ideas for an entirely different crime setup. His would ally the Italian criminals with powerful Jewish mobsters into a syndicate that would slice up the crime pie fairly and would even make the pie bigger. What impressed many young mafiosi was that Luciano, through Frank Costello enjoyed excellent relationships with important elements in the police and in politics. He offered far better protection than either Joe the Boss or Maranzano. Luciano soon was in a position to know what each chief was up to, having secret supporters spying for him in both camps.
For years Luciano had been close to Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky who he regarded as the most brilliant criminal mind in the country; their original plan was for Lansky to line up the Jewish mobsters around the country and Luciano the various Italian elements. Lansky had the easier chore, all but a few important Jewish mobsters saw the virtues of a national crime syndicate. Among the Italian crime families, Luciano had to proceed more cautiously. The pair decided the safest course was to let Masseria and Maranzano weaken each other with continual bloodletting until one or the other perished. Then as the Luciano/Lansky team gained strength, they would strike the remaining old don.
However, by 1931 Masseria and Maranzano were still at it. Maranzano gave far better than he got, but he was not yet the victor. Fearful that Maranzano would accumulate too many supporters as the conflict continued, Luciano and his cohorts decided to eliminate Joe the Boss. On April 15, 1931, Luciano lured Masseria to lunch at a restaurant in Coney Island. After the meal the pair played cards while all the other patrons cleared out. Then Luciano went to the men's room. While he was gone, four assassins rushed into the establishment and laid down a fusillade of 20 bullets. Masseria was struck six times and was dead when Luciano strolled out of the men's room.
Luciano then declared peace with Maranzano. Maranzano was pleased and, in supposed gratitude, made Luciano his number one man in his new organization. In a remarkable conclave, he summoned 500 gangsters to a meeting in the Bronx and outlined his grandiose scheme for crime. The New York Mafia would be divided into five major crime families, each with a boss, a sub-boss, lieutenants and soldiers. Above all the five families would be a "boss of bosses." That was Salvatore Maranzano. Maranzano dubbed this new organization Cosa Nostra, which really meant nothing more than "our thing."
All would be peaceful and profitable, he asserted. Secretly though, Maranzano did not believe that. He rightly gauged Luciano's great ambition, and realized that by dealing with non-Italian mobsters, Luciano was creating his own power base, one that would soon threaten Maranzano. He also knew that Luciano still commanded the loyalty of many important men within this new Cosa Nostra. He composed a death list of top mobsters who had to be eliminated. The list included Luciano, Costello, Genovese, Adonis, Moretti, Schultz and Chicago's Capone, who had been friendly with Luciano for years.
Maranzano knew it would not be easy to kill all these men and he decided not to risk all-out war before at least some were eliminated. Otherwise, he could not be sure who was on whose side and who might betray him to Luciano. Maranzano decided to have the job handled by non-Italians so that he could pose as innocent. He recruited the notorious young Irish killer Vince "Mad Dog" Coil and arranged for him to come to his office in the Grand Central building at a time when Luciano and Genovese would be present. Apparently Coil was to kill the pair that day and "lose" their bodies so that he could knock off as many of the others as possible before the murders became known. Maranzano gave Coll $25,000 as a down payment and promised him $25,000 more on the elimination of the first two victims.
However, Luciano got wind of the assassination plan and knew the murder operation would start when he got a phone call summoning him to Maranzano's office. Luciano, through Lansky, already had his own murder team in training with a plot to kill Maranzano. He ordered that training speeded up. On September 10, 1931, Maranzano telephoned.
Shortly before Luciano and Genovese were slated to arrive at Maranzano's headquarters, Tommy Lucchese walked in. Maranzano was unaware of Lucchese's link to Luciano. (In fact, Lucchese was Luciano's main spy inside the Maranzano organization even before Masseria's murder.)
Shortly after Lucchese arrived, four men walked in flashing badges and announcing they had questions to ask Maranzano. The four were Jewish gangsters Luciano had borrowed for his counterplot since Maranzano did not know them. They also did not know Maranzano which was why Lucchese was presentto make sure they got the right man.
The bogus officers lined up Maranzano's bodyguards against the wall and disarmed them. Then two went into Maranzano's office and stabbed and shot him to death. The assassins and Lucchese charged out. So did the bodyguards when they found that their boss had been executed. On the way down the emergency stairs, one of them ran into Mad Dog Coil coming to keep his
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own murder date. Informed of the new situation, Coll turned and left whistling. He was $25,000 to the good.
Maranzano's death had far-reaching effects on organized crime in America. Essentially, it marked the end of the Italian Mafia in America. What remained was a new American Mafia that would become part of a national syndicate with other ethnics, something the old Mafia was too rigid to allow. Luciano immediately eliminated the post of "boss of bosses" and called the new organization the "combination" or "outfit'' or as a sop to the traditionalists among the mafiosi the ''Unione Siciliano," a corruption in spelling of the longtime Sicilian fraternal organization. The concept of "Cosa Nostra" died as well with Maranzano, not to be revived by federal authorities and a cooperative Joe Valachi until the early 1960s, as a way to get J. Edgar Hoover out of a deep hole. For decades he had denied the existence of the Mafia and organized crime, but now he could announce with a straight face that the FBI had been studying the "Cosa Nostra" for a long time. Thus even when he was partially right he was 30 years behind the times.
See also:
Mustache Petes; Night of the Sicilian Vespers
.
Marcello, Carlos (19101993): Mafia boss of New Orleans
One of the most stolid, hardline crime family bosses in the country, Carlos Marcello ran New Orleans and Louisiana like a closed shopa tradition in that Mafia chapter since its creation in the last century.
Nobody from any crime family "insulted" Marcello by coming to New Orleans without permission. Informer Joe Valachi once told Vito Genovese. his New York boss, he wished to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Genovese's reply, Valachi testified, was, "'Don't go.' No explanations, just 'Don't go.' They didn't want anybody there. And I was told if I ever had to go to Louisiana, Genovese would call ahead and get permission. Genovese himself had to get permission. It was an absolute rule."
Carlos Marcello was born Calorso Minicari, in Tunis, North Africa, in 1910, of Sicilian parents. He was brought to America at the age of eight months. His first arrest occurred when he was 20 for bank robbery. The case was dismissed, a not unusual beginning for the future bigs of crime. His police record includes such charges as dope peddling, gambling, income tax evasion, robbery and aggravated assault. Marcello won a full pardon from Louisiana's governor for the assault conviction; the New Orleans family has always enjoyed a cozy relationship with many local and state officials.
By the mid-1930s, the young Marcello had become one of the most trusted aides of Mafia boss Sam Carolla, and while the latter sojourned for a brief period in federal prison, Marcello took charge of discussions with the Luciano-Lansky-Costello clique from New York. The trio had won rights from the Kingfish, Senator Huey Long, to bring their gambling operations and slot machines into the state. In a sense, this violated the New Orleans crime family's rule excluding outsiders, but the offer was too good for Marcello to refuse. The New Yorkers supplied all the capital, Long provided the political protection, and the New Orleans family took a hefty share of the profits. Years later, an irate Crazy Joe Gallo demanded "Who gave Louisiana to Frank Costello?" It would have been interesting to see how long the Gallos might have lasted had they come down to New Orleans and asked that of Marcello directly.
Carlos Marcello was an enduring ruler of the New Orleans Mafia,
an organization that allows no other mafioso to enter the
area without special permission.
Over the years Marcello was subjected to a number of deportation attempts, none of them successful. Once, when efforts were being pressed to have him sent to Italy, it was said Marcello responded by sending off a lawyer to Rome with a bagful of money. The going rate for key figures in the Italian Parliament was put at $10,000 each, and, in due course, the Italian foreign ministry informed the U.S. government that Marcello was not an Italian citizen and would not be accepted for deportation. Remarkably, the U.S. government had not
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made until then a formal deportation request. It was said payments continued for another three years while further unsolicited decisions emanated from Rome. The U.S. government did try to interest France and Tunisia to take Marcello, but these efforts came to naught. Finally, in a bizarre episode, the United States virtually kidnapped Marcello and deposited him in Guatemala, claiming he was a citizen of that country.
Finally, facing popular outrage, Guatemala demanded the United States take him back. Washington refused and Marcello was virtually smuggled into El Salvador. From there Marcello and his lawyer trekked through the jungle into Honduras. Then, in a zany conclusion to the affair, Marcello simply got on a commercial airliner to Miami and walked right through customs and immigration without even being checked. He was back in the United States to stay.
In December 1960, Attorney General-designate Robert Kennedy announced he had two priority targets on taking office: Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa and Carlos Marcello. Bobby Kennedy's ability to go after Marcello disappeared with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
In the meantime, Marcello had grown in stature within the Mafia. He was consulted on all major syndicate actions and appears to have made friends within the CIA, having been involved in the supposed plots to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba. Ever since the assassination of President Kennedy, theories contrary to the findings of the Warren Commission have often pointed to the Mafia as the real killers, especially toward Santo Trafficante Jr. of the Tampa, Florida, crime family and Marcello, both of whom were quoted as making threats against the Kennedys because of the administration's pressure on organized crime. According to this thesis, the mob's real target was Bobby Kennedy. The best way to tame the attorney general's office was to eliminate the president.
Marcello throughout the years denied the charges. He was subjected to considerable legal problems near the end of his life but persisted in his claim that he was no more than a "legitimate businessman" being harassed by the government. Essentially, Marcello's rule over his familyout of the country, in prison or on the loosewas ironclad. Also beyond dispute is that Marcello was a multimillionaire, his wealth in 1975 estimated at more than $60 million. In failing health, he died in 1993.
See also:
Bourg, Frank; Carolla, Sylvestro "Sam"; Charity and the Mafia; Deportation of Mafiosi
.
Marion Penitentiary: For the Mafia's most dangerous
It became home for Mafia boss John Gotti after his conviction in 1992. It was also labeled inhumane by Amnesty International. It is the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, the most restrictive of all federal penal institutions for its time. When Gotti was delivered to the Marion warden, there were at least two mob men he knew (but never got to see) in the prisonNicodemo "Nicky" Scarfo, the brutal ex-boss of the Philadelphia family, and Jimmy Coonan, the top honcho of the Westies, the New York Irish mob affiliated with the Mafia, and some of the crime cartel's most ardent killers.
Other notorious prisoners included John Walker, the Navy man who sold classified information to the former Soviet Union; Edwin Wilson, a U.S. government employee who sold weapons to Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi and conspired to kill eight witnesses to his crime and Jonathan Jay Pollard who spied for the Israelis. It was an open question whether these prisoners were there because they constituted a continuing menace to the nation and society or because they were incarcerated in such a way to inflict great mental punishment on them.
Kept in the most restrictive level of confinement in prison, an 8-by-7-feet underground cell for 22 to 23 hours a day, Gotti had no work, no communal recreation, no communal education classes. Food was delivered through a slot in the cell door. All that he was allowed in his cell was a single cot, a basin, a toilet, a radio and a black-and-white TV. There was not even a chair to sit on. Rather than spend all his hours prone on his cot, Gotti folded his mattress into an L shape, which he propped against the wall to simulate a chair. It was said he read, watched television (mostly talk shows) and exercised by doing probably 1,000 push-ups a day. He was taken to his shower shackled in chains inside a movable cage. His contact with the outside was limited to five monthly visiting periods, mostly with his lawyers or his son Junior. The FBI admitted Gotti continued to rule the Gambino family through his son, who served as acting boss of the family, passing along his father's instructions.
Most lifers sent to Marion are kept there 30 months and then transferred to a regular maximum-security prison elsewhere. Gotti's time on that basis was completed in 1995, but he remained in Marion. It was said that his lawyers did not press the issue of his long confinement for fear it would prolong the situation or possibly cause his transfer to an even harsher federal prison that had since opened in Colorado.
Some speculated that authorities still harbored hopes that Gotti would "break" and finally turn informer against the mob in exchange for some form of leniency. Some members of the media insisted they had indications that there had even been an attempt on Gotti's life, most remarkable considering his isolation.

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