Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (34 page)

The catalyst for all this change was money-the immense profits to be made
from the sale of illegal alcohol. Before Prohibition, a single shot of uncut
Scotch sold for fifteen cents. Quickly the cost of that same shot of Scotch rose
to seventy-five cents with the quality of the alcohol making a comparative
drop. Bootleggers bought a quart of quality Scotch at sea for four dollars,
then diluted it into three quarts selling for as much as forty dollars a bottle.

And there was plenty of alcohol available at home. Homemade "hootch"
was often the life of the party-provided it didn't blind or kill.

But-profits aside-the greatest impact of Prohibition was to make
crime and criminals acceptable in the minds of the general public. City
hoodlums who before would never have been allowed in genteel circles
became the heroes of the hour. The enormous profits from selling illegal
alcohol made respectable businessmen of men who months before had
been thugs.

Because of the unpopularity of Prohibition, buying protection from city
and police officials became an easy chore. Chicago police chief Charles
Fitzmorris once stated: "Sixty percent of my policemen are in the bootleg
business." Many people thought his estimate was too low.

Local governments, overwhelmed by the wealth and power of the
gangs, increasingly turned to Washington for help. Federal authorities
found their hands were tied since, at that time, crimes were under the
jurisdiction of the states. To counter the growing crime rate, more and
more federal laws were passed, giving authority to federal agents.

Now, in addition to the growing power of the criminal empire, Americans saw law-enforcement powers slowly shift from local officials to the
national government. New power bases arose, such as the fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigation, begun in 1909, and a variety of Prohibition
agencies, which were to evolve into such modern forms as the Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (forerunner of the Drug Enforcement
Agency) and the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agency.

Illegal booze was smuggled into the United States in every conceivable
manner and from every conceivable point-across the Mexican and Canadian borders and offloaded from ships to small powerboats that moved out
of remote bays almost at will.

The profits were enough to turn even erstwhile honest businessmen to
bootlegging. One such businessman would seem to be Joseph P. Kennedy,
patriarch of the Kennedy clan. Although no conclusive evidence of Kennedy's bootlegging is available-his business papers are still kept locked
away in Boston's John F. Kennedy Library-it has been widely rumored
that the elder Kennedy got started on the road to riches by importing illegal
booze.

Rumors have it that Kennedy made a fortune bringing Canadian whiskey
into Boston. This charge is supported by the fact that as soon as Prohibition ended, Kennedy immediately was in the Scotch, gin, and rum business
through a firm he founded called Somerset Importers.

Everyone fared well by flouting Prohibition. "I admit quite frankly that
I made a fortune from bootlegging, "Meyer Lansky told biographers,
adding:

Everybody I knew treated Prohibition with contempt. The most important people in the country-respectable businessmen, politicians, sena tors, congressmen-they all bought illegal booze from me or from other
men in the business.

After thirteen years of Prohibition, even its most ardent supporters were
forced to concede that it simply didn't work. If enough people want a
commodity, others will find a way to get it to them-for a price.

The price of prohibited alcohol-the massive corruption of the political
and legal system, the enormous power wielded by the criminal gangs, and
the deaths and maimings from toxic hootch and gangland wars-was too
steep. On December 5, 1933, Prohibition was repealed.

After national Prohibition ended, each state created its own liquor
authority, opening up avenues for bribery and payoffs that hadn't existed
before.

Liquor and beer laws differed widely from state to state and even from
city to city. Even today, liquor laws are a bewildering forest of statutes,
regulations, and directives that defy any pretense of rationality.

And the gangsters didn't get out of the liquor business. Their illegal
"speakeasies" simply became legitimate cocktail lounges and bars, often
with frontmen to apply for the necessary licenses.

As the Prohibition era dawned, many gangsters recognized the opportunity that presented itself. In Chicago, Big Jim Colosimo was not one of
them. Afraid of bringing federal lawmen down on him, Colosimo prevented his right-hand man, Johnny Torrio, from handling any alcohol other
than what was needed for the gang's brothels and speakeasies. Torrio was
frustrated. On orders from Torrio, an ambitious New York gangster named
Frankie Yale came to Chicago and on May 11, 1920, put a bullet through
Colosimo's head.

Colosimo's funeral lasted three days, with more than five thousand
mourners including two congressmen, three judges, one soon-to-be federal
judge, ten aldermen, a state representative, and many other community
leaders. It became the prototype for subsequent gangster funerals.

By now, every section of Chicago was ruled by a gang. The illegal
operators of these gangs were often intensely competitive and their rivalry
was fueled by racial and ethnic prejudices.

Torrio tried to make peace. Calling the gang leaders together, he argued
persuasively that peaceful cooperation would lead to higher profits for all
concerned. During the early 1920s, the "united" Chicago underworld
prospered.

Then, in 1923, a gang from the far South Side tried to muscle in on
Torrio's bootlegging operation. This challenge was halted quickly with the
murder of eight gang members.

But the bloodletting-along with a new reform-minded mayor-resulted in strong pressure on the gangs from the authorities. This prompted
Torrio to move his entire headquarters to a suburb-Cicero, Illinois where by bribery and threats he became undisputed master of the town.
This was the beginning of a movement out of the traditional cities into new
and more controllable communities.

Opting for semiretirement, Torrio traveled to his native Italy, where he
was greeted like a conquering hero. He left the Chicago operation in the
hands of an underling, Al Capone. Where Torrio was quiet, debonair,
and opposed to unnecessary violence, Capone was the distinct opposite. A
gambler, bully, and womanizer, Capone's answer to every problem was to
apply gangland muscle.

In mid-May 1929, a meeting of the nation's underworld leaders was
held in Atlantic City. It was decided that Capone had to go and that the
gangs had to start looking for other avenues of profits since it appeared
that Prohibition was on its way out. This was one of the first major
meetings between gangsters, who only years before would have been
blood enemies. But times were changing and so were the methods of the
criminals.

On his way home from the meeting, Capone was arrested for carrying a
concealed weapon and sentenced to one year in prison. After serving that
sentence, he soon was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to
federal prison for eleven years. "You won't see me for a long time," he
said while being led away. Capone was released in 1939, but died soon
afterward, insane from the ravages of syphilis.

In New York, Arnold Rothstein, who intially had stayed aloof from
bootlegging, became the largest supplier of illegal booze in the East.

Rothstein was considered a wealthy front man by New York's real
Mafia leaders, which by the late 1920s were two large families run by
Giuseppe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. These families were locked
in a protracted blood feud known as the Castellammorese War (from
Maranzano's Sicilian hometown of Castellammore del Golfo).

Eventually, gangsters from both New York and Chicago were drawn
into the war. By 1931, the war was going against Masseria when one of
his lieutenants, Charles "Lucky" Luciano (real name: Salvatore Lucania)
decided to arrange a "peace." On April 15, 1931, Luciano, along with
some Masseria men loyal to him, met with Masseria in a Coney Island
restaurant. After lunch, everyone left except Luciano and Masseria. Moments later, after Luciano stepped out "to go to the washroom," three
men entered and fired more than twenty rounds at Masseria. Six hit
Masseria in the head and back.

Luciano immediately called a meeting with Maranzano ending the war.
But, Maranzano declared himself "capo di tutti capi" (boss of all bosses)
and announced a new family structure, which remained in place into the
1960s.

Soon Luciano and his underboss, Vito Genovese, learned that Maranzano
was planning to eliminate them, so plans were set in motion to end
Maranzano's rule. Maranzano had scheduled a meeting with Luciano and Genovese in his office on September 10, 1931, but before it could take
place, four men posing as police officers came in and murdered Maranzano.
The murder of Maranzano was accompanied by the killing of several
Maranzano henchmen-and, it has been alleged, as many as forty other
Mafia chieftains across the country-thus breaking the power of the
old Mafia guard.

Luciano was now the preeminent leader of the criminal mobs. Wisely,
he declined the title of "boss of all bosses." Instead, Luciano created a
commission of bosses and organized the old Mafia families into a national
crime syndicate. It was Luciano who finally realized the dream of Torrio
and Rothstein-the merging of the criminal gangs into a national crime
syndicate.

Backed by the deadly power of Murder, Inc.-a group of killers organized by Louis "Lepke" Buchalter in 1927 whose sole client was the
Mafia-Luciano continued to gain absolute control of the syndicate he
created.

During this time, Luciano began to move control of crime away from
the traditional Italian and Sicilian families. New faces were beginning to
show up in the crime syndicate. The Jewish math wizard Meyer Lansky,
Legs Diamond, Dutch Schultz, and Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel were among
those slowly being admitted to policy meetings. But Luciano was still the
man in charge. After extensive investigation, Senator Estes Kefauver
wrote: "The Mafia is the cement that binds organized crime and the man
who perfected the cement was Luciano."

Next to Prohibition, one of the most far-reaching events in the history of
organized crime came during World War II when Lucky Luciano became
partners with the U.S. government.

By the mid-1930s, Luciano was a wealthy crook with interests in a wide
variety of legal and illegal activities. However, he never gave up his
original means of making money-prostitution. It proved his undoing.

In 1936, under special New York County prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey,
Luciano's phones were tapped and his prostitutes brought in for questioning. On April 1, Luciano, along with several associates, was indicted on
ninety counts of compulsory prostitution. His trial was a sensation. The
public was entranced and appalled as one prostitute after another told tales
of beatings, degradation, and drug addiction. Luciano was convicted and
sentenced to thirty to fifty years in prison. He was first taken to Sing Sing,
but later transferred to Clinton State Prison at Dannemora near the Canadian border.

It appeared Luciano was safely put away. But then came World War II.

The war produced undreamed-of wealth for the mobs wherever they were. The friendly bootleggers of yesterday became the friendly black
marketeers of today, supplying nylons, new cars, gasoline coupons, tires,
food ration stamps, and even military commissions and discharges.

It was even unnecessary to counterfeit ration coupons. Gangsters simply
obtained real ones from corrupt officials within the Office of Price Administration, a semi-volunteer organization that counted among its young
lawyers an aspiring politician from California, Richard M. Nixon. One
man who dealt with the OPA and became rich in the automobile tire
business during the war was Charles G. "Bebe" Rebozo, who remained
close friends with Nixon through the years.

Toward the end of 1942, the first year of war for the United States,
things were not going well for the U.S. Navy. In March of that year alone,
twenty-four American ships had been sunk by German U-boats.

Then on November 9, 1942, the former French liner Normandie, caught
fire and rolled over in her North River moorings in Manhattan while being
refitted as a troop carrier. It was plainly an act of sabotage-and later was
attributed to mobster Vito Genovese, who returned to Italy during the war
and supported dictator Benito Mussolini.

Furthermore, Naval intelligence was convinced that information about
ship convoys was being transmitted to the Axis by longshoremen of
German and Italian extraction.

In a desperate attempt to compensate for years of neglect in the intelligence field, U.S. military officers decided to contact the mob for help.

Navy Secretary Frank Knox created a special intelligence unit for the
Third Naval District, which included the Port of New York, which handled
nearly one-half of all U.S. foreign shipping. This unit was headed by Lt.
Commander Charles Radcliffe Haffenden, who quickly opened an unobtrusive-office in Manhattan's Astor Hotel, where he met with mob figures.

The Navy appealed to Manhattan District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey to
put them in touch with Mafia leaders. A Dewey investigator, Murray
Gurfein, contacted Mafia boss Joseph "Socks" Lanza as a first step.
Lanza immediately went to Meyer Lansky, who had helped guide Luciano
in organizing the national crime syndicate. Lansky, sensing an opportunity
to build his prestige with the syndicate, met with Commander Haffenden
and promised to get Luciano's support. Years later, Lansky told biographers:

Sure, I'm the one who put Lucky and Naval Intelligence together .. .
The reason I cooperated was because of strong personal feelings. I
wanted the Nazis beaten . . . I was a Jew and I felt for those Jews in
Europe who were suffering. They were my brothers.