The Quiet Don: The Untold Story of Mafia Kingpin Russell Bufalino (12 page)

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Aren’t you able to do that because of the contacts and associates that you have, Mr. Bufalino?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And they include such people, do they not, as Johnny Dioguardi?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“John Ormento?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Nig Rosen?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Dominick Alaimo?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“John Charles Montana?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Vito Genovese?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“James A. Osticco?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Frank Carbo?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“James Plumeri?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Thomas Lucchese?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“We have telephone calls from you, Mr. Bufalino, to L. G. Carriers, which is James Plumeri’s company. Could you tell us what you discussed with them?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“What do you discuss with Charles Bufalino?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds that the question may tend to incriminate me.”

“The Tri-City Dress Co., owned by Anthony Guarnieri, can you tell us about that?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds that the question may tend to incriminate me.”

“The Vic Vera Sportswear Co., New York City, which is owned and operated by a close friend of James Plumeri?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Isn’t it a fact that James Plumeri set this lady up in the Vic Vera Sportswear Co.?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And Harvic Sportswear, of Scranton, Pa. Can you tell us what you called them about?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“That is a shop, is it not, that is owned by Thomas Lucchese?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Have you also had other sources of income from gambling, Mr. Bufalino?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“You have taken a great interest in basketball games, have you not?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And when you go to New York, you stay at the Hotel Forrest in New York City, is that correct, Mr. Bufalino?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds that the question may tend to incriminate me.”

“Why is it that you and the individuals with police records very often stay at the Hotel Forrest in New York City?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds that the question may tend to incriminate me.”

“Isn’t it correct that you arranged with Mr. Barbara to set up the meeting at Apalachin in November 1957?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Isn’t it correct that you were talking by telephone with Mr. Barbara frequently just prior to the meeting at Apalachin?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“According to the information that we have, you made long distance telephone calls to Barbara on June 8, 11, 23, two on the 28th, July 23, July 27, September 4, September 11, September 12, October 6, October 13, and October 26, is that correct?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds that the question may tend to incriminate me.”

“And he called you on June 5, 10, 24, July 20, August 9, and October 23?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And isn’t it correct that you in fact made hotel reservations for some of these individuals attending the meeting at Apalachin?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Isn’t it a fact that you made a hotel reservation at the Casey Hotel in Scranton, Pennsylvania, for November 13, 1957?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And you made hotel reservations for an individual by the name of J. Cerrito, of Los Gatos, California?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And that another reservation for the same night was made for J. Civello of Dallas, Texas?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And this individual did, in fact, attend the meeting at Apalachin, is that correct?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And Scozzari, from San Gabriel, California?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“While he was there, Mr. Scozzari put in two telephone calls to you, isn’t that correct?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And isn’t it a fact that Mr. Scozzari attended the meeting at Apalachin?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And Frank DeSimone, you also made a reservation for him.”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Mr. Scozzari, when he was arrested, or stopped by the police, had $10,000 on him, but listed himself as unemployed. Can you give us any explanation for that?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“All these hotel reservations that were made for these 5 individuals, of which we can show that 3 actually attended the meeting in Apalachin, were all charged to you personally, isn’t that correct, Mr. Bufalino?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Did these other two individuals, Lanza and Scozzari, attend the meeting but were not caught?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“When you came to the meeting, you came, did you not, with DeSimone, Civello and Scozzari?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“That automobile that you drove was owned by William Medico, was it not?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And he owns the Medico Electric Motor Company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Excuse me. That should be in Pittston, Pennsylvania. He owns the Medico Electric Motor Company. in Pittston, does he not?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“This is the same individual that Mr. Montana stated that he was driving down to see, to find out how his compressor was coming?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And you in fact were driving an automobile belonging to one of his companies up to the meeting at Apalachin, were you not?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“At the time that the New York State troopers checked your car, you had Vito Genovese with you, did you not?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Gerardo Cateno?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Dominick Olivetto?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And Joseph Ida?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And you stayed, when you were in Binghamton in March—you made another visit to Joseph Barbara in March 1957, did you not, Mr. Bufalino?”

“I respectfully decline to answer on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And at that time, you were with Vincenzo Osticco, isn’t that right?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And also with you was Angelo Sciandra, and you stayed at the Arlington Hotel, in Binghamton, New York?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“And the bill was charged to the Canada Dry Beverage Company, of Endicott, New York, was it not?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“What were you there for? What business were you there on?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Do you know how your cousin, William Bufalino, was made head of Local 985 of the Teamsters?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Do you know Mr. James Hoffa?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

“Do you know Mr. Santo Volpe, from Pennsylvania?”

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me.”

Kennedy paused after the long series of questions, then turned to Senator McClellan.

“Mr. Chairman,” said Kennedy. “We consider that this individual is a very important figure. He has a number of the dress companies that operate in Pennsylvania. He also played an important role in the labor negotiations that took place at the beginning of this year. He is a close associate of Mr. Chait and it would appear that he was the one, together with Barbara, who set up and made the appointments and arrangements for setting up the meeting at Apalachin. He is a man of considerable importance and a man of great contacts throughout the United States and the underworld.”

“Do you want to comment upon those statements?” said McClellan.

“I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me,” said Bufalino.

N
INE

W
hen Jimmy Hoffa was elected president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 1957, it capped a remarkable career that had begun twenty years earlier in Detroit.

Hoffa had been the Teamsters national vice president since 1952, serving under then president Dave Beck, who had been accused of stealing from the Teamsters by failing to repay a $300,000 loan. When he was questioned about the loan during his testimony before the McClellan Committee, Beck invoked his Fifth Amendment right more than one hundred times. The negative publicity that followed his testimony led Beck to decline another run for the Teamster presidency, and Hoffa stepped in and gained the votes at the Teamster convention in Miami Beach to become their new leader.

Hoffa now headed the most powerful union in the country, and given his long-rumored associations to organized crime figures in Detroit and New York, he drew greater scrutiny in his new position, especially from the McClellan Committee and its zealous chief counsel, Robert F. Kennedy.

Kennedy was relentless in his pursuit to expose Teamster corruption, particularly Hoffa’s alleged relationships with organized crime. During his testimony before the committee, Hoffa in turn was pugnacious, giving purposely vague answers while going head-to-head with Kennedy during televised hearings that transfixed the nation.

The government wasted no time prosecuting Hoffa, who was eventually indicted in December 1957 for illegally bugging Teamster offices to determine if any of his people were sharing information with the McClellan Committee. The trial ended in a hung jury, with one lone holdout for conviction. A second trial was interrupted when a juror reportedly was approached with a bribe to acquit Hoffa. That juror was replaced, and when the trial ended, Jimmy Hoffa was acquitted.

The failed prosecution only served to embolden Hoffa, who by now considered himself one of the most powerful men in the country. Despite his standing, Hoffa knew he still needed friends, especially those with unique skills who could be tasked with special assignments.

* * *

FRANK SHEERAN’S INTRODUCTION
to Jimmy Hoffa was on the telephone.

Sheeran was a U.S. Army veteran who served as a rifleman with the Forty-Fifth Infantry Division in Europe during World War II. Known as the “Thunderbird Division,” the Forty-Fifth had spent an incredible 511 days in combat, and Sheeran was on the front lines for more than 400 of those bloody days. Serving under General George Patton, the division was trained to kill with no remorse, which it did from the day it landed in Sicily in 1943. Soon known as the “Killer Division,” Sheeran couldn’t count the number of Germans and Italians whose lives he had ended. Despite a casualty rate that reached near 100 percent, Sheeran somehow survived his 411 days on the front lines, but the war left him emotionally detached. Killing became easy, and it was a talent that would be found useful a decade after his return to America.

It was in central New York State where Sheeran first met Russell Bufalino. Sheeran was working for a food company in Philadelphia and driving a truck through the Binghamton, New York, area when the engine sputtered. He pulled into a truck stop to take a look and was approached by an older man with a tool kit. It was Bufalino, who explained that in his younger days he had been trained as a mechanic. Sheeran had no idea who Bufalino was, or that the “chance” meeting may not have been by chance at all.

Aside from driving a truck, Sheeran had been doing odd jobs on the side to make extra money, from selling football lottery tickets to picking up payments for a local Philadelphia loan shark. Word eventually filtered to Bufalino about a hungry, six feet four U.S. Army vet who had spent more than a year on the front lines. It wasn’t long after they met at the truck stop that Sheeran and Bufalino saw each other again, at a restaurant in Philadelphia.

Bufalino was sitting with Angelo Bruno when he saw the big Irishman standing out above the patrons at the bar. Bufalino sent an underling to bring Sheeran to his table and greeted him warmly. Their reintroduction eventually led to a job, with Sheeran serving as a driver for Bufalino, chauffeuring him to business meetings throughout the northeast. But Bufalino wasn’t just interested in Sheeran’s driving ability. It was only a matter of time before Sheeran proved his true value when he accepted a job to kill a low-level gangster. Bufalino had relied on a handful of men to dispatch enemies and others whose business interests interfered with his. Chief among Bufalino’s killers was Gioacchino “Dandy Jack” Parisi, otherwise known as Jack, who had worked with Albert Anastasia in New York as a member of the infamous “Murder Incorporated” crew of mob killers before fleeing to Hazleton in the 1930s to avoid a murder indictment.

Killing was still easy for Sheeran. No feeling. No remorse. The order from Bufalino would usually come with little advance notice, maybe a day or so, and Sheeran would carry out the job using a gun, a knife, even his bare hands, and dispose of the remains. After cementing his relationship with Bufalino, Sheeran shared his wish for a bigger role with the Teamsters. Sheeran had been a member of Local 107 in Philadelphia since 1947, and Bufalino subsequently put him in touch with Hoffa, who, like Bufalino, had use for Sheeran’s talents. Within a year, Sheeran was working for Hoffa’s home Teamsters Local 299 in Detroit, while Bufalino would be focusing his attention on events outside the United States.

* * *

ON JANUARY 1,
1959, Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba ahead of the quickly advancing rebel army led by Fidel Castro. It was Batista, believing his power was absolute and unquestioned, who ordered the release of Castro from prison in 1955 following the failed attack of a Cuban army barracks in 1953. The young revolutionary, a lawyer by trade, went to Mexico with Che Guevara to plot the revolution that would ultimately lead to Castro’s overthrow of the Batista dictatorship. A short time after forcing Batista to flee, Castro nationalized the hotels and casinos and threw the mobsters off the island.

Bufalino’s flight from Cuba was on a boat with Vincent Alo, a member of the Genovese family who had for years been one of Meyer Lansky’s top lieutenants and partners in the casino business.

Lansky and Bufalino first met in the 1930s, when Lansky partnered with Lucky Luciano in various gambling endeavors in Florida and Cuba. Lansky had also supported Bugsy Siegel’s efforts to create a gambling mecca in a sandy outpost known as Las Vegas. But Lansky directed his full attention to Cuba, and it was Lansky who set the initial terms with Batista that led to the explosion of new casinos in Havana in the 1950s.

It was through Lansky that Bufalino got his good friend Kelly Mannarino of Pittsburgh a piece of the Sans Souci casino following discussions at Bufalino’s Gold Coast Lounge in Hollywood, Florida, where he often met with south Florida boss Santo Trafficante and New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello.

But as the changing political climate took hold during the late 1950s, the chief concern, aside from the McClellan Committee, was what to do about Cuba. The island was far too lucrative, and it was producing revenues from a variety of businesses, not just the casinos, that simply could not be lost. Organized crime had long supported Batista, though that support had been waning, given Batista’s constant demands for bigger slices of their casino deals.

The solution was to play both sides of the Cuban problem and quietly support Castro along with Batista. As the revolution grew, the Mafiosi provided each sidearms shipments after Castro agreed that if he indeed prevailed, his new supporters would keep their casinos and other businesses.

But after arriving in Havana on January 8, 1959, Castro didn’t waste any time tossing the mob bosses and their underlings off the island. Lansky and Bufalino beat him to it, fleeing the island in boats just days before. The casinos were subsequently nationalized, and Castro outlawed gambling as he quickly drifted the country away from the influence of the United States and toward its nemesis, the Soviet Union. Bufalino, along with the other Mafiosi who stood to lose millions from the events in Cuba, was irate, and regaining control of the island was a priority, even an obsession. A year later, in 1960, it appeared that the answer to everyone’s prayers was the newly elected president, an Irish Catholic senator from Massachusetts.

It was before the November 1960 election when Bufalino received a call from Jimmy Hoffa. The two men needed to talk, only not over the phone, said Hoffa. The Teamsters had left Indianapolis and built a palatial headquarters in Washington, D.C., and when Bufalino arrived, Hoffa said he had been contacted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and the agency wanted to do something about Fidel Castro.

Bufalino, along with the other mob leaders, had no use for any government organization. The FBI and Department of Immigration had hounded them in recent years, as did the various congressional committees. But the CIA was a different animal. Formed after World War II to provide the government with international intelligence through the use of covert operatives placed in countries around the world, the CIA was a civilian agency that operated with little government oversight. During the years following World War II, the CIA morphed into a rogue entity. And following Castro’s takeover of Cuba and his alliance with the Soviet Union, the CIA quickly deduced that Castro had to be eliminated. How to do it was up for debate. The idea on the table that drew lukewarm support was to enlist some of the gangsters who lost their lucrative interests in Cuba. The idea somehow made sense, given the Mafiosi were angry and motivated, and if any word of their effort was publicized it would be easy for the CIA to deny any allegations that the agency was involved. After all, who would believe that a highly respected government entity would associate with organized crime figures?

It was Hoffa who would serve as the go-between. Hoffa had friends like Bufalino who didn’t just lose casinos and other businesses in Havana—they left behind fortunes. And in Bufalino’s case, there was also the nearly $1 million in cash he buried in the ground hours before fleeing the island. The deal, said Hoffa, was simple: the CIA offered to help Bufalino retrieve the money if he in return would help in eliminating Castro and/or provide logistics in the event an invading army reached Cuba.

Hoffa told Bufalino that he had already reached out to Sam Giancana in Chicago and Johnny Roselli in Los Angeles to gain their cooperation, and all were led to believe that the plan had been approved by the newly elected president, John F. Kennedy. Cooperating with the Kennedy administration through the CIA seemed a sure bet to return control of the casinos to their rightful owners, and all agreed it was a deal they couldn’t pass up. There was also a belief, at least by Hoffa, that helping the CIA might help in getting the Justice Department off his back. Besides, word had filtered of an arrangement Kennedy had with Giancana or, rather, a deal struck by Kennedy’s wealthy father, Joseph, that had turned the election in Kennedy’s favor, so a precedent had been set for some level of cooperation.

By April 1961, Bufalino confided to a few close friends that Kennedy was planning something for Cuba. In a telex dated April 12, 1961, two FBI agents reported that Russell Bufalino had arrived in Washington, D.C., supposedly to meet with his attorneys handling his ongoing deportation case. Bufalino was still under surveillance as part of the FBI’s Top Hoodlum Program, and the telex aroused little concern. Bufalino slipped out of Washington and headed to Florida and then to the Bahamas, where he boarded a boat and waited for transport to Cuba.