Island of the Damned (5 page)

If
the New York authorities needed any evidence that Joe Rao’s rule over Welfare Island was not a one-off phenomenon, Clark had supplied it. A thorough review of official records dating back several years also indicated how many early warning signals had been overlooked – or ignored – by their predecessors prior to 1934.

The
most serious event that took place at the prison before the 1934 raid was in 1932, when a prisoner, 36 year-old George Holshoe, was stabbed to death in a brawl which sparked a huge riot at the jail. The murdered man was one of the leaders of a band of Irish prisoners who at that time were locked in an ongoing feud with the Italian gang of prisoners. Joe Rao had arrived at the prison on January 7th 1932, and by October had earned the nickname “the Harlem Terror” being by then a feared leader of the Italian group. On the morning of October 22nd, representatives of the two factions, including George Holshoe and Joseph Bendix from the Irish group, together with Joe Rao, Patsy Cuomo, and Frank Mazzio from the Italian gang, had gone to Warden McCann’s office to discuss their grievances. In the midst of the discussion, Holshoe, who became outraged at a comment made by Frank Mazzio, leapt up and hit him. Rao darted forward trying to intervene and got hit too. A scrum ensued and suddenly a knife appeared and was plunged into Holshoe’s chest just as Warden McCann rushed over to separate the men.

Crowds of prisoners who had congregated outside McCann’s open office door immediately took sides with the two gangs and began fighting, using their fists, knives, rocks, broken furniture, lead pipes and anything else that came to hand. As Holshoe lay on the ground, dying from deep wounds to the chest and back, the riot escalated. Guards who tried to control the rioters were shoved aside; Warden McCann’s orders to stop were ignored. Word spread to several hundred prisoners exercising outside in the yard: they rushed in and joined the riot. After McCann reported the emergency New York’s police headquarters, more than 350 policemen, armed with machine guns and tear gas bombs were rushed to the island in boats. They managed to corral several hundred rioting convicts and lock the ring leaders into solitary confinement. Three planes circled overhead and a squad of patrol boats surrounded the island to prevent attempts by prisoners to escape by swimming away.

Although
it was impossible to establish who had killed George Holshoe, Joe Rao, as well as Frank Mazzio and Patsy Cuomo, were held for questioning, since they were in close physical proximity to Holshoe when he was stabbed. The following day, as quiet returned to the jail, the District Attorney’s office in Manhattan started an investigation into Holshoe’s murder. Warden McCann claimed that “racial animosity” between the Irish and Italian prisoners was to blame for the killing and the riot. He absolved Joe Rao of blame for the riot, claiming that all Rao had tried to do was take the role of peacemaker. The real problem, asserted McCann, was overcrowding, since the prison’s maximum capacity was 1,400 but the current number of inmates was 1,642. When asked whether there had been any rivalry over the control of alleged drug trafficking within the prison walls, McCann vehemently denied that any such trafficking existed.

Having
reared its ugly head in 1932, the rumour of drug trafficking would not go away. Within days, a report surfaced stating that Federal agents and New York State officials had received a tip-off about a drug trafficking ring in the prison. The U.S. Attorney George Medalie ordered a searching investigation into conditions at the jail, with particular focus on the riot. “This is a very serious case. This must be a vigorous investigation, not some wishy-washy affair,” announced Medalie, adding that he had been personally told by former inmates that the activities of the drugs ring were probably responsible for the riot. Meanwhile, things were looking bleak for Rao and his friends. The District Attorney’s office ordered evidence surrounding Holshoe’s murder to be presented to a grand jury, the first step in bringing charges of homicide against Rao, Mazzio and Cuomo. Although eighteen witnesses, including Warden McCann, were called to give evidence before the grand jury, and the two assistant D.As in charge of the investigation stated they intended to bring homicide indictments against all three men, the case never came to court.

Such
lack of action did not surprise many insiders. The post of Manhattan District Attorney was at that time held by the elderly Thomas Crain, a kindly but ineffectual man appointed by Tammany city officials as their puppet, knowing he could be counted on to be lenient with any criminals who had Tammany protection. It was therefore not surprising that no one connected with the murder of George Holshoe came to trial. D.A Crain, who had failed to prosecute hundreds of crimes, had already been denounced by some senior judicial figures as a “senile incompetent.” There had even been a petition by the respected City Club of New York to Franklin D. Roosevelt, at that time Governor of the State of New York prior to his election as President, to order Crain’s removal from office. Their view was that Crain was unfit to hold the office of District Attorney on the grounds that he was “incompetent, inefficient and futile” and had failed to conduct prosecutions for “crimes and offences cognizable by the courts”.

Attempts
to get to the bottom of drug trafficking on the island fared little better. Jacob Rosenblum, a sharp witted, tenacious Assistant United States Attorney, working under George Medalie, managed to subpoena about thirty witnesses to give evidence to a grand jury. Unfortunately Rosenblum also needed written evidence, and was confronted with the almost impossible task of ordering city officials to submit records which could throw light on the sale and distribution of drugs on the island. These records were held by the Department of Correction, whose officials had already proved indifferent to the maintenance of law and order at Welfare Island. Months, then years, passed in obfuscation, red tape, excuses and delays before some of the records needed to bring a case were released. As Chief Commissioners and their deputies at the department came and went, delivery of those records was delayed until the case had been forgotten. The Holshoe murder was not the last such prison crime: in June 1933, a small-time gangster, Angelo Caruso, serving time for coercion, was mysteriously stabbed to death as he returned from noon mess. Caruso was found alone, lying outside his cell: he had been stabbed four times; his jugular vein and carotid artery had been severed by a knife and scissors and there were wounds to his back and temple. There were no witnesses to the killing, and no suspects were identified. It later emerged that Caruso was the victim of a feud arising from gambling in the prison.

Chapter
Four - The Tammany Machine

By the time of the 1934 raid on Welfare Island, many New Yorkers were too inured to stories of mob violence, organised crime and corruption to be unduly shocked or even surprised by the newspaper reports. When this small strip of land in the East River was unveiled as a sordid outpost of mob rule, many of the city’s residents recognised similar rottenness on their own island of Manhattan. In exposing the scandal, Commissioner Spike MacCormick had held up a mirror to New York City: the reflection warned them that Welfare Island’s regime of vice and crime was merely the tip of the iceberg, a microcosm of what was happening in the metropolis. The city’s attitude to crime and the apparent lack of law and order was one of cynicism mingled with contempt for the authorities’ apparent inability to clean up the city. There was also rising anger. A new decade had dawned, and the party was over. The excesses of the 1920s Jazz Age had fizzled out, giving way to desperation and austerity after the 1929 Wall Street Crash and as a result of the rigours of the Great Depression, which had already claimed many victims and destroyed livelihoods. New York, like the nation, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Citizens and social reformers, as well as the press, began to voice their opposition to a society grown apparently indifferent to a culture of sleaze and institutionalised crime.

Crime
was sharply on the rise. Prohibition, now at an end, had spawned a ruthless mob culture motivated by greed, and rendered deadlier by its close ties to Tammany Hall, New York City’s long-time Democratic Party leaders who remained in charge of the city’s local government. Organised corruption was nothing new. Within the so-called Tammany Hall “machine” - the collective name for the city’s administration - financial skulduggery was a long established feature of New York politics and went back to the nineteenth Century and decades of crookery under the leadership of Tammany’s infamous “Boss Tweed”. The so-called “Tweed Ring”, the boss’s coterie of corrupt politicians, amassed vast riches at the public’s expense from 1858 until the arrest and trial of William Tweed in 1872, which prompted an outpouring of reformist rhetoric by leading liberal figures. The Tammany Society of New York City, founded in the 1780s came to dominate the city’s politics from the 1850s until the election of Fiorello La Guardia as New York’s first reformist Republican mayor in November 1933. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the organization, whose emblem, the tiger, led caricaturists to depict Tammany as a predatory animal, seized political control by improving everyday life and working conditions among the city’s growing immigrant communities. Those who benefited most were the Irish, as well as the first wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Significantly, Tammany controlled Democratic Party nominations and most New York City elections and enabled immigrants to rise up in American politics from the 1790s until the 1960s. In exchange for immigrants’ support and votes, Tammany’s powerful “district leaders” offered to provide these new arrivals with three basic necessities: employment, homes – and citizenship.

So great was the immigrants’ support of Tammany politicians that their leaders, “bosses” such as William Tweed, Charles Murphy and John Curry, elected in 1928, acquired immense powers and wealth for themselves and their associates through administrative abuses. Tales of municipal bribery, coercion, and vote rigging had become legend. In his autobiography, Harpo Marx described his early childhood in New York during the first decade of the 20th Century, when deprived inner city families looked forward to election day - the city’s most popular public holiday. In every disadvantaged area of the city, Tammany’s district leaders, determined to win votes, doled out free food including cakes and sweets for the children and cigars and beer for the men. Bands played, streets held parties: it was a day of indulgence and merrymaking for all. Harpo Marx recalled horse-drawn carriages arriving at his family’s home and neighbours’ houses to take the adults to cast their votes and then drive them home. Several hours later, the carriages would turn up again to take the families to vote for a second time; if more votes were needed, the whole process was repeated a third time. New York’s poor neighbourhoods also knew they could rely on donations of clothing when times were hard, and on free turkeys which were delivered by the Tammany ward leaders every Thanksgiving Day and Christmas.

A
popular summer fixture was the sponsored “June Walk and Picnic” in Central Park, which involved up to 25,000 people, mainly children, drawn to tables brimming with food including cakes, chocolates and wine for the adults. A 1999 interview with six of the De La Salle Christian brothers, retired Irish Americans whose parents settled in New York in the 1920s and founded Christian educational institutions, provides a vivid illustration of how Tammany could always be relied on in hard times: “My father worked in construction but he was also a precinct captain in the local Tammany club,” recalled one brother. “When he needed a job, he went to the precinct leader and said he wanted a job. The leader wrote something on a piece of paper, sealed it in an envelope and told him to take it to the Municipal Building tomorrow. At home, they steamed it open, and it said, ‘Take care of him, he’s a good guy’. My father got a civil service job until he retired.” The brother went on to recall his own experience of Tammany’s largesse: “When I was a kid, I didn’t know what that district leader did, but I knew his name. ‘Go see Jimmy’ was what you heard when you needed this or that. One of the things Jimmy did was to make sure every kid in the neighbourhood got a Christmas present. You’d go to the 24th precinct on 100th Street, get a ticket from the cop, which then let you get on line Christmas morning after Mass at the club on 96th and Columbus Avenue. When you went in, you got a pretty decent present.”

This particular “Jimmy”, always at hand at times of need was Jimmy Hines, the popular and exceptionally powerful leader of the 11th Assembly District of Harlem which put him in charge of that vast area, although he also held influence over Times Square and other neighbourhoods south of Central Park. By the 1930s, Jimmy Hines was to become notorious for his alliance with the underworld, notably cultivating a cosy business partnership with mobster Dutch Schultz. From the early 1920s, when he gave police protection to the notorious bootleggers Owney “the Killer” Madden and “Big Bill” Dwyer, Hines was the man who pulled all the strings, the shadowy Mr Big behind every leading Mafioso and racketeer. He played golf with gangster Charles “Lucky” Luciano on a junket trip to Palm Springs and also shared a hotel suite in Chicago with Luciano at a 1932 Democratic convention: it was there Hines gave his wholehearted backing to the nomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt as the party’s presidential candidate. Once in the White House, Roosevelt rewarded Hines for his loyalty by permitting him to award all federal patronage posts in Manhattan to his own personally chosen individuals.

The
kinship between Tammany Hall and the underworld was flourishing by the early thirties. This unholy alliance controlled most sectors of New York’s local government departments, where corruption spread, like dry rot, to the highest echelons, including the office of New York’s Tammany-elected Mayor and the city’s police. Crime was seen to pay – and handsomely. Now that millionaire gangsters like Dutch Schultz, Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello, dubbed the “Prime Minister of the Underworld”, were the new overlords of New York, everyone had their price, from politicians and public prosecutors to the lowliest civil servant. The emergence of the new robber barons was only possible because of the “fixers” in their pay, politicians whose power and apparent respectability afforded the mafia dons immunity from the law. The mob infiltrated major businesses from rubbish collection, construction, funeral services and kosher butchers to restaurants and entertainments, the garment and textile industries and, famously, the Fulton fish market; they controlled the labour unions, notably trucking and long shore workers, while demanding protection money from bosses in return for agreeing not to sabotage their businesses. Virtually no aspect of city life was untouched: in order to manufacture or sell anything in New York, someone had to be paid off. “Tribute” payments represented a major hidden cost, since any company hoping to secure business contracts in the city had to inflate its prices and kick back a percentage of its income to the mob. Profits were squeezed, but few took action against the mob, which by then had grown too powerful and deadly – and too rich.

As
crime soared and racketeering became a fact of life, prosecutions and conviction rates plummeted. These were dark days for New York’s judiciary. Financial crookery was rife in law enforcement and penal institutions. From the city’s police department to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, magistrates’ courts and the State Supreme Court, extortion and bribes were commonplace. Police officers in the city’s vice squad framed the poor and innocent – especially women – while helping well connected criminals and repeat offenders beat the rap. Ambitious police officers routinely gained promotion by paying thousands of dollars to their superiors or to a local Tammany leader while also pocketing so-called “ice” or protection money from racketeers. Conversely, diligent police officers who refused bribes and routinely cautioned or arrested gang members, were reported to the mob’s local Tammany protectors, who complained to the police commissioner. Soon these “clean” officers were demoted to pounding New York’s notoriously dead end beats such as Staten Island, far from the mob. Magistrates, who on a nod and a wink from a Tammany leader repeatedly acquitted known thugs, such as Joe Rao and his cousin Vincent, had often bought their seat on the bench for around $10.000 to a Tammany “fixer”, usually a senior district leader like Jimmy Hines who had the power to submit to the state governor the name of an ambitious lawyer for appointment to the bench. Judgeships, whether for general sessions or the State Supreme Court, went to the highest bidder: the going “fee” was anywhere between $25,000 and $50,000, handed over in crisp new currency.

By
1929, Republican New York State congressman Fiorello La Guardia became a candidate for the office of New York Mayor. His main opponent was the incumbent Mayor, debonair playboy James Walker, Tammany “Boss” Murphy’s golden protégée, who was elected in 1925 and whose natty tailoring, showgirl mistresses and jet setting lifestyle amused the press, entertained the public and enraged social reformers in equal measure. In a thinly veiled attack on Jimmy Walker’s hedonistic style and
laissez
-
faire
attitude to crime, La Guardia inveighed against the spread of lawlessness in the city and conjured up the spectre of an earlier dark age of Tammany misrule. “The present administration is the most wasteful and extravagant in the history of New York, and the slimy trail of waste, recklessness and corruption is unparalleled since the days of Boss Tweed,” he raged. Mayor Walker, whose early background was as a composer of Broadway show tunes, including the hit song
Will
You
Love
Me
in
December
as
you
Do
in
May
? far from being rattled, cavalierly dismissed La Guardia’s reformist zeal: “A reformer is a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat”. When La Guardia challenged New York State Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt to use his powers to order a clean-up of the city, Roosevelt declined, and Mayor Walker, still the city’s darling “Mr Broadway” was re-elected.

Roosevelt’s
failure to tackle organised crime while holding the post of New York State Governor seems a mystery given his integrity and later political achievements. However, given the dates and pending challenges in his political career, there is an explanation, though it does him little credit. Until 1932, Roosevelt had allowed the Tammany Democrats to run New York City their way: this benevolence has been explained by the fact that in 1930 he needed their votes for his re-election as State governor; crucially, he also depended on Tammany’s goodwill if he was to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for the 1932 presidential election. However, by 1932, once he was nominated as the party’s presidential candidate, Roosevelt began to realise it was time for him to be seen as his own man, capable of a tough stance against crime and corruption now endemic in his state.

By
1932 it was obvious how much Roosevelt needed to be tough about. In the lead-up to Roosevelt’s campaign for the presidency and Fiorella La Guardia’s second successful 1933 bid to become Mayor of New York, a series of crimes soon set the stage for one of the biggest battles against political corruption and organised crime in the modern history of New York City. In the words of one historian: “a crime-fighting extravaganza” was about to take place. The inability of police investigators and prosecutors to solve three major crimes, all involving gangland connections, would ultimately swing public opinion against Mayor Walker, and prove to have massive repercussions on the judiciary and the Manhattan District Attorney.

The
first such crime was the fatal shooting, on election day 1928, of the wealthy gangster and gambling czar Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein, who had known links to Tammany Hall, was a major wheeler-dealer and crooked financier famous for conducting business in his customary booth in Lindy’s restaurant on Seventh Avenue near Broadway. His biggest claim to fame is the allegation that he masterminded the so-called “Black Sox” scandal, the fixing of the 1919 World Series, by bribing members of Chicago’s White Sox baseball team. Rothstein, who operated a chain of gambling houses, owned banks, employed his own tipsters and provided bail and legal representation to his employees, was immortalised by the writer Damon Runyon as the Nathan Detroit character in
Guys
and
Dolls
. Rothstein was also the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character Meyer Wolfsheim, the millionaire gambler who finances bootlegger Jay Gatsby in
The
Great
Gatsby
.