Honor Thy Father (18 page)

“Oh how awful,” one of the aunts said.

“It’s so terrible,” another said, “that they would risk their lives just to make liquor.”

“What’s the difference?” Rosalie asked. “Bill smuggled in provolone and…”

There was silence around the table. Every one looked toward Bill, who looked at his plate, neither laughing off her remark nor elaborating upon it. Finally one of the aunts spoke up.

“That was
food
,” she said. “That was different.”

“Yes,” another woman agreed, “That was different.”

Rosalie shrugged, got up to get more coffee. Bill then continued to talk, changing the subject to religion in jail, remarking on how surprised he was by the great variety of Bibles that were available to the inmates—there were dozens of different Bibles, he said, Jewish Bibles, Christian Bibles, even the Koran. Every week or so, members from Bible societies would arrive in prison to preach to those inmates willing to listen. Bill said he always attended these lectures, welcoming the opportunity of seeing new faces behind bars, and he was about to say something more when his four-year-old son, Joseph, came running into the room crying, complaining of something that his older brother, Charles, had done to him. But Bill quickly cut him off, demanding, “You want to grow up and become a stool pigeon?”

The little boy stopped whimpering.

“No,” he said, “no!”

“All right then,” Bill said, “so don’t go telling on your brother that way.”

A
LTHOUGH
J
OSEPH
B
ONANNO CONTINUED TO ELUDE THE
hunt of the FBI and the police during 1965 and was still hiding as winter turned to spring in 1966, the government claimed it was making progress in its national campaign against organized crime. It had greatly increased its knowledge of the secret society, had intensified public awareness through the cooperation of the press, and it had succeeded in harassing and arresting, if not always convicting, many mafiosi and other gang members of varying ethnic and religious backgrounds who were either employed by the Mafia or were working with it.

In New York City alone in 1965, more than 400 arrests were made in organized crime, and throughout the nation there were continuous raids against bookmakers and loan sharks, operators of illegal gambling casinos and other enterprises that the government called “mob-controlled.” Fourteen bolita operators were arrested in Tampa, Florida, by the Internal Revenue Service; 34 pimps, prostitutes, and gamblers were arrested in Columbus, Ohio, by the local police; 68 persons were arrested for illegal gambling in Chester, West Virginia, by the state police. Sixty gamblers were convicted in Nashville, 34 gamblers were arrested in St. Paul, 31 in Denver, 24 in St. Louis. The FBI relayed 180,000 items of criminal information to various investigative units on the federal, state, or municipal level, and there was also cooperation between law enforcement officials in the United States and overseas. The police in Sicily interrogated many Mafia suspects in Castellammare about the Bonanno case, and in Germany, agents from Interpol, the international police organization, looked up Bill Bonanno’s former girl friend to ask if she knew anything about the elder Bonanno’s disappearance. She said she did not, never having met Joseph Bonanno, although she did admit having seen him once a few years ago sitting with another man in the cocktail lounge in Arizona where she had worked. She guessed that he had come to see for himself the woman who had attracted his son, and after he had finished his drink he left the lounge without comment and with a generous tip.

Although the government contended that organized crime was the most lucrative business in America, experts quoted in newspapers and magazines were unable to agree on how many billions of dollars were derived each year from illegal enterprises run by gangs. Their estimates ranged from $10 billion to $40 billion annually; and even the more conservative reports conceded that organized crime probably netted more profit each year than the combined earnings of United States Steel, AT&T, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Electric, Ford, IBM, Chrysler, and RCA.

About three-quarters of the crime revenue was contributed by citizens who bet on horse races and other sports events with bookmakers, or played the numbers. While the typical numbers bettor might be a Harlem housewife on welfare who deposits 25 cents each morning with a neighborhood “runner,” hoping to overcome 1,000—to—1 odds and “hit” the daily number, which by prior agreement might be the last three digits of the total money bet at the local track that day, and while the typical patron of a bookmaker might be an auto mechanic or a porter who invests $2 on a horse each day, there are enough of these gambling citizens in America—millions to whom a small bet is a daily tonic and who cannot afford to go in person to a track—to support the fabulous industry of illegal gambling, an industry that has been flourishing for many decades despite the tactics of crime busters and the will of puritanical lawmakers.

The numbers game is the national pastime of city slums, is a source of hope, however small, for the urban poor crowded into blocks of 10,000 people, living in teeming tenements each with its “runner,” each with its corner store that may be a “drop” for numbers slips that are later picked up by “collectors” and delivered to “controllers” who record the data and later pay the winners. The controllers, who usually work with their aides in private apartments that are protected by alarm systems and lookouts, are answerable to the neighborhood “banker,” who represents the mob that oversees the whole network and covers the bets. If a “runner” or other employee is caught by the police, it is the controller’s responsibility to pay for the bail and legal fees out of his profit; but the bribery of the police, whose cooperation is essential for numbers racketeering to function, is handled by a representative of a Mafia “family” or whatever ethnic gang is backing the “bank” in a particular section of the city.

While police graft is expensive, with gangsters complaining that the police sometimes take almost half of the profit (and more when there is pressure from headquarters to “clean up” crime), there nevertheless is enough money after the payoffs and other operational costs to keep hundreds of numbers couriers running each day and the “banks” booming with business. It was estimated in
The New York Times
that the numbers lotteries in Harlem alone earned $ 1 billion a month in profits and that the Vito Genovese “family,” which was heavily involved in several Harlem banks, had twenty-seven millionaires among its “soldiers.”

The Lucchese “family” was also active in the Harlem numbers, and so was a Puerto Rican syndicate under the leadership of Raymond Marquez, known in the newspapers as “Spanish Raymond.” Marquez’s father many years ago was a runner for Genovese’s men, but Marquez is his own boss, has his own gang, and reportedly earns more than $3 million a year from his banks, although a few are believed to be affiliated with mafiosi and sharing the profits. The numbers kings in the South Bronx are Jewish—Samuel and Moishe Schlitten, whose banks are said to be even more profitable than Raymond Marquez’s, but the Schlitten brothers, too, are reportedly in partnership in certain areas with members of the Genovese and Lucchese organizations.

There is probably not a densely populated lower- or middle-income neighborhood in New York that does not support numbers racketeering; and the bookmakers are everywhere. Some of the more respectable business firms in the city have a bookmaker or two among its employees, men who do their jobs and book bets on the side—and it has long been possible to bet through bookies even in courthouses, law offices, and the New York Times Building, where the editorial writers denounced racketeering in print while certain staff members and editors supported it with their betting.

Many bookies in midtown Manhattan, particularly on the West Side and in the Garment Center, were linked to the Lucchese and Bonanno organizations, and the Bonanno men also worked with Jewish and Puerto Rican racketeers in bookmaking and numbers on the Lower East Side. All the “families,” including the Bonannos and the Profacis, had well-coordinated numbers networks in Brooklyn and parts of Queens, and their most persistent bettors were not only the blacks but also Italians and Latin Americans, many of whom had begun playing numbers in their native countries where lotteries were usually legal. While many black Americans worked in organized crime as runners, and a few became controllers, it was largely in the wake of the civil rights movement that black gangsters finally began to demand and achieve equal opportunities. By the early 1960s, the police were able to conclude that a few banks in the black ghettos of Brooklyn were being run by black men, some with Mafia ties, some not.

A second source of revenue for organized crime was loan-sharking, which most crime spokesmen estimate earns more than $1 billion in annual profits. Though the interest rates might be twenty percent, customers are always available because several thousand Americans, many of them black, can not borrow from legitimate sources, since they have poor credit ratings. Some of these people are on welfare, some are gamblers down on their luck, others are small businessmen struggling because of mismanagement or other personal failings. To such people the loan shark represents the primary source of quick relief.

If they do not repay the debt, however, they will undoubtedly receive threatening phone calls, and they might then seek expiation by going to work in the crime industry. If they have a business, they might accept a gang member for a partner, under whom the business most likely would go bankrupt because the assets were drained. Occasionally a victim of loan-sharking, rather than try to pay or become more deeply involved, will go to the police and become an informer, but such men sometimes pay with their lives.

Another source of money for organized crime in the 1960s was narcotics, which while said to be less than half as profitable as loan-sharking and more risky in every way, nonetheless attracted many members of the criminal establishment in spite of the disapproval of most Mafia dons. The dons could not govern the behavior of each underling any more than a general could control the acts of every soldier, and if the underlings managed to smuggle in a large heroin shipment without getting caught and if they shared the profit with their superiors, questions might not be asked. But a permissive policy toward narcotics by a Mafia boss sometimes backfired when the smugglers were caught, and in 1959 the federal agents were able to link Vito Genovese with a narcotics case and he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Joseph Bonanno had a strong policy against narcotics trafficking, once vowing that if any of his men were caught they would be put in one of the ovens of a bakery he owned; however, during one of his extended absences from New York, a key officer in his organization, Carmine Galante, was charged with involvement in a narcotics ring, and Galante was convicted and given a twenty-year sentence.

The marijuana market, according to federal agents, had not enticed the Mafia or their associates because marijuana was too easily gotten through the Mexican border and because the trade was overrun with free-lance gangsters and youthful adventurers. But if government agents succeeded in limiting the supply, if tougher laws inhibited and lessened the number of importers and drove up the price, the expert smugglers in organized crime might flock to marijuana as they had to bootlegging during Prohibition. Meanwhile, they had all they could handle in their present endeavors, reportedly making so much money that their main problem was hiding the money or investing it in places that would return a profit but would not expose them to charges of tax evasion. One favorite outlet for such investments was in real estate, where it was not uncommon for the owners of property to function behind “fronts.” It was long suspected by the government, for example, that Frank Costello was the secret owner or part owner of the Lucayan Beach Club in the Bahamas as well as the Copacabana nightclub and the Pompeii Restaurant in New York; and there was hardly a name in crime that was not listed in government files as owning either a bowling alley or bar, a trucking company or food-packing concern, a laundry or stretches of undeveloped land.

Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans don, was said to own tracts of land in the path of a federal highway soon to be constructed; and Carlo Gambino, the New York don, was allegedly the owner of several million dollars’ worth of real estate in New York City. Newspaper reporters in 1965 were told privately by the United States Attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, that his office had information indicating that Mafia groups owned the downtown property in which
The Wall Street Journal
was published, owned the midtown building in which
Vogue
was published, owned the building on East Sixty-ninth Street where the FBI had its headquarters, and owned the Chrysler Building. Although an extensive job of research by
New York Times
reporters failed to produce the evidence to support the disclosures, the
Times
did quote in one article a federal investigator who said: “If the black flag of the underworld were to unfurl atop one of the tallest skyscrapers in New York, it would be a fit symbol of how the Mafia has gained control of that building and many other real estate holdings.”

Morgenthau had three grand juries probing into organized crime during 1965 and 1966. One jury focused on the overall picture of the syndicate, the relationships between “families,” a second jury delved exclusively into the affairs of the Lucchese family, and a third jury concentrated on the Bonanno family and its missing leader. Hundreds of witnesses were subpoenaed, most of them uncooperative, but the government nevertheless amassed enormous amounts of information that gave new insight into the life style of the men who dominate the crime charts of the McClellan committee and other investigative units. The government files noted certain gangsters’ mannerisms, their styles in dress, their favorite hangouts and restaurants, their hobbies, the great efforts that some took with their lawns and in being good neighbors, and the efforts that such men as Thomas Lucchese made in keeping agents and other interlopers from invading the privacy of his home in Lido Beach, Long Island. All windows of his residence were wired by the Supreme Burglar Alarm System. There was a large two-way mirror in the front door, and a large mirror on a pole in front of the house which allowed anyone looking through the two-way mirror at the mirror on the pole to observe all vehicles entering or leaving Royatt Street from Lido Boulevard. There was a photoelectric eye in the windows and anyone walking by the windows could set off an alarm. There was a large bell alarm system on one side of the house under the eaves. There were spotlights on all sides of the residence.

The government’s special probe into the Bonanno organization was becoming increasingly irritating to many of the members; while they proclaimed their innocence or ignorance of organized crime in their testimony, they were constantly being recalled to answer more questions every time the government produced a morsel of new information or conjecture about increasing dissension within the Bonanno “family.” Since the government did not always know which gang members were Bonanno loyalists and which had joined the Di Gregorio faction—indeed, many of the men themselves did not know, since there was so much fence-straddling, suspected disloyalty, and confusion—the government agents paid particular attention to the mannerisms of the men gathered in the courtroom corridor waiting to testify, looking for hints that might reveal which men were friendly and which were hostile. Aware of this, the gang members tried to conceal their feelings, and a few proved to be good actors, although many were not.