The Mob and the City (10 page)

Like mainstream franchises, the Mafia even had something resembling arbitration panels to resolve disputes among its members. In his memoirs on the 1920s,
mafioso
Nicola Gentile describes a “council” in which bosses from different Mafia families met to hear charges of wrongdoing and resolve disputes.
⁹⁹
Later, the Cosa Nostra created “the Commission” as a forum to resolve major disputes. As Joe Bonanno explained, “The Commission, as an agent of harmony, could arbitrate disputes brought before it.”
¹⁰⁰
In
chapter 3
we will look at how the Commission came into being in 1931.

THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF TELEPHONES, AUTOMOBILES, AND PLANES

New technologies have been described as waves that roll through society. At the same time that new technologies were changing New York, they were transforming organized crime as well.
¹⁰¹

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York gangsters had relatively limited reach. Groups like the “Eighteen Street Gang” or the “Bottle Alley Gang” rarely controlled more than a couple blocks.
¹⁰²
They were hampered by unreliable communication and transportation. The early Mafia families actually communicated by mail. Men of Honor would even carry with them “letters of recommendation” from their mob bosses when they traveled to new cities.
¹⁰³
Communicating through hard documents proved risky: in the early 1900s, the United States Secret Service seized letters of members of the Morello Family and used the letters to build cases against them.
¹⁰⁴

The advent of the modern telephone system gave organized crime a valuable new tool to communicate efficiently across regions and the United States. As service grew, New Yorkers developed the habit of using the telephone regularly on massive levels from the 1910s onward.
¹⁰⁵
Professional criminals were relatively free to use phones in this time, too. The Federal Communications Act of 1934 prohibited the interception and disclosure of wire communications,
rendering any wiretapped phone conversations inadmissible in federal court. This remained the law until 1968.
¹⁰⁶
Although local law enforcement was not so restricted, it was often compromised by corruption from investigating organized crime. From the 1920s through the mid-1950s, there was something of a golden era for gangsters to use phones. Los Angeles goodfella Jimmy Fratianno used pay phones to have conversations about loansharking and casino operations through the 1960s. Asked why he did not take more precautions, Fratianno, referring to his 1970s conviction, explained: “Well, later years we did, but like see, I was the first person that ever went to jail on a wiretap in Los Angeles.”
¹⁰⁷

The telephone expanded the reach and efficiency of organized crime starting in the 1920s. New York
mafioso
Frank Costello regularly phoned his partner Phillip “Dandy Phil” Kastel in New Orleans to coordinate their joint gambling operations. During the 1940s, state police discovered that
mafioso
Joseph Barbara was calling gangsters throughout the East Coast (he kept his conversations short and veiled to avoid incrimination). Despite the growing risks, the efficiencies from telephones were so great that
mafiosi
were still communicating over pay phones (using coded words) well into the 1970s. As Judge Richard Posner points out, phones are so efficient and attractive that they are
still
used by many gangsters despite the risks.
¹⁰⁸

Mass-produced automobiles opened up new territories and criminal enterprises as well. By 1927, a majority of America households owned a car.
¹⁰⁹
Gangsters likewise started using automobiles for criminal activities. Joe Valachi got his start as a “wheelman” for burglaries, driving his careening Packard car through the streets after heists.
¹¹⁰
Bootlegging operations depended on fleets of trucks. The Mafia began relying on cars to smuggle narcotics, too.
¹¹¹

These new technologies enabled gangsters to forge cross-country links during Prohibition. As historian Mark Haller describes, “Bootleggers east of the Mississippi were wintering in Miami and occasionally vacationing in Hot Springs, Arkansas,” they met “in Nova Scotia or Havana, to which they traveled to look after their import interests,” and those with joint ventures were in “continual contact by telephone” to coordinate activities.
¹¹²
Las Vegas's casino industry, in which mobsters conducted skimming operations, would not have developed without modern cars and airplanes.
¹¹³

TECHNOLOGY AND GAMBLING: THE NUMBERS LOTTERY AND SPORTS BOOKMAKING

Technology had its most direct impact on illegal gambling operations. Although gambling had been around forever, it was boosted by new communications in the 1920s. The Mafia families specialized in two different forms of gambling: the numbers lottery and sports bookmaking.

During the 1920s, the numbers lottery took off in New York City. Historians have shown that New York's illegal lotteries nearly disappeared in the early 1900s, following revelations that paper drawings were being fixed by their operators. In the early 1920s, African-American gangsters in black Harlem built a new numbers lottery based on an unimpeachable public source of randomly generated numbers: the New York Clearing House. Each morning at 10:00 a.m., as the clearings numbers were announced in Lower Manhattan, numbers runners would telephone the winning digits throughout Gotham. “Once the Clearing House numbers became known in Harlem, the game spread like wildfire,” describes a history of the numbers lottery.
¹¹⁴

Numbers lotteries were highly territorial in areas of New York City. Numbers lotteries required “banks” and numbers “shops” (such as liquor stores that sold numbers under the counter) in neighborhoods to enable a large customer base of numbers purchasers. For banks and numbers shops to operate, pay-offs to the police and protection from others were required.
¹¹⁵
As a result, the Mafia held interests in numbers lotteries around New York. In the 1930s, the lucrative Harlem numbers lottery was taken over by members of the Luciano family, and it was passed down for decades from Michael “Trigger Mike” Coppola to Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno.
¹¹⁶
Likewise, Joe Bonanno recalled how when he became a boss in central Brooklyn, he “also inherited the ‘rights’ to the neighborhood lottery.”
¹¹⁷
Later, his son Bill Bonanno described how “a member could run numbers within a designated four-block area of the neighborhood,” and “if someone else interfered by encroaching on his territory,” the family would intervene.
¹¹⁸

Bookmaking was revolutionized by wire services, telephones, radio, and later television. Bookmaking involved handling wagers on sporting events like horse races and boxing matches. During the 1930s and ’40s, “wire rooms”
became tools to obtain instant sports results. The Chicago Outfit muscled in on a major wire service to gain an informational advantage on sporting results. This advantage, however, faded with television. “Wherever there was a television set, there was a new type of sports wire service,” described a history of bookmaking. Unlike numbers lotteries, bookmaking could be handled largely over the phone and with “runners,” and did not require as many brick-and-mortar locations.
¹¹⁹

Gambling, and bookmaking in particular, has sometimes been called the “life blood” of organized crime. This is somewhat misleading. The ease of bookmaking made it commonplace among low-level wiseguys. However, since it was so easy to become a bookie, the market was fairly competitive and the profits limited.
¹²⁰
Mob soldiers tended to use bookmaking as everyday “work” income and to raise capital for more lucrative activities.
¹²¹
Few wiseguys relied
solely
on bookmaking to make money.
¹²²

Prohibition reversed the fortunes of the Italian gangsters in New York City. But they were also bolstered by historical trends that were accelerating in the 1920s. The Italian gangsters were very much in the right place at the right time. The profits from bootlegging and other rackets, however, would soon lead to internal conflicts among the Mafia families. In our
next chapter
, we will look at a series of gang fights that have been shrouded in Mafia mythology.

He wanted something more terrible than money: power. And he had decided to carry out any action in order to obtain absolute power and to become the boss of bosses.

—Nicola Gentile,
Vita di Capomafia
(1963)

Al Capone was causing trouble for the Sicilians in New York. Capone had been on a meteoric rise since his teenage days as a wharf rat on the Brooklyn waterfront. Barely in his thirties, he was vying to become boss of Chicago during Prohibition. Except now Joseph Aiello, a Sicilian
mafioso
, was ominously calling Capone an “intruder” in Chicago. As the son of immigrant parents from Naples on mainland Italy, Capone was sneered at by many in the Sicilian Mafia who had thrown their support behind Aiello.
¹

The wild card was Joe Masseria, the new
capo di capi
or “boss of bosses” of the Mafia. Had Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria gotten different press, he might today be as well-known as Alphonse “Scarface” Capone or Charles “Lucky” Luciano. Joe Masseria built a sprawling Mafia syndicate, the largest in New York during Prohibition. He was less concerned with Sicilian lineage than with recruiting the toughest, shrewdest bootleggers he could find. Could Al Capone the Neapolitan gangster make a deal with Joe the Boss?

What followed next has been called the “Castellammarese War of 1930–1931,” a conflict which, it is said, created the modern Mafia. In his bestselling autobiography
A Man of Honor
, Joseph Bonanno, who participated on the
winning side, paints a romanticized portrait of the “war.” Under Bonanno's conventional telling of the story, the noble Castellammarese clan of Brooklyn—the true “Men of Honor”—rally to defend themselves against the greedy, low-class Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria. This so-called Castellammarese War is the source of many myths about the Cosa Nostra. Even its title is misleading. This was hardly a “war”; it was
not
only about the Castellammarese clan of the Mafia; and it originated back in the 1920s.
²

Another set of myths paints this as a generational conflict in which younger “Americanized” mobsters pushed aside the older Sicilian
mafiosi
. The conventional history suggests that Italian-American gangsters like Charles “Lucky” Luciano were impatient with the more tradition-minded, Sicily-born “Moustache Petes” for failing to modernize to the times in New York City. But as we will see, the historical facts do not square with this popular myth of “Americanization.”
³

Rather, the conflicts were simply gang fights over money and power. Different
mafiosi
with self-interested motives were rebelling against overreaching by three successive boss of bosses: Salvatore D'Aquila, Joe Masseria, and Salvatore Maranzano. Let us call it simply the
Mafia Rebellion of 1928–1931
. This chapter tells a revisionist history of this conflict and explores what it actually meant for the New York Mafia. It dismantles the myths presented by the winners of the “war” and perpetuated by subsequent writers on the mob.