The Mob and the City (15 page)

3–5: Charles Luciano, boss of the Luciano Family. (Courtesy of the New York Police Department)

3–6: Vincent Mangano, boss of the Mangano Family. (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)

3–7: Joseph Bonanno, boss of the Bonanno Family. (Used by permission of the NYC Municipal Archives)

3–8: Joseph Profaci, boss of the Profaci Family. (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)

3–9: Al Capone, boss of the Chicago Outfit (© Bettman/CORBIS)

3–10: Steve Magaddino, boss of the Buffalo Arm. (Photo by Walter Albertin, courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, New York World-Telegram and Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection)

Although Joe Bonanno and others have portrayed the “Castellammarese War of 1930–1931” as a defense of the honor of the Castellammarese clan, the facts show it to be something less romantic. Rather, the Mafia Rebellion of 1928–1931 was mostly about money and power. But the rise of the modern Mafia was more than just the result of high-level intrigue among mob bosses. Our
next chapter
looks at how the Mafia's soldiers gained footholds in the labor unions.

Q. You don't call a Chinaman or an Italian a white man? No, sir; an Italian is a Dago.

—Testimony of construction superintendent in Congressional hearings (1890)

The thefts and pocket pickings now pale into insignificance when compared to the achievements of the racketeers…the rackets in connection with liquor, dope, food, milk, the building trades…the use of gangsters in labor troubles.

—Testimony of criminologist in Congressional hearings (1934)

In the 1950s, Giovanni “Johnny Dio” Dioguardi was a national expert on the art of labor racketeering. He had come a long way from his childhood in Little Italy.
¹
When he was twenty years old in 1934, Dioguardi represented the Allied Truckmen's Mutual Association in a dispute with Local 816 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
²
A labor mercenary, Dioguardi later
created
“paper locals” of the Teamsters for his ally Jimmy Hoffa. Dioguardi forged himself into a “labor consultant” by applying select mayhem at weak points in a union.
³

But Johnny Dio had also been riding a wave of social forces for decades. He came of age as the labor movement was taking off in the 1930s, and he dealt with unions comprised of southern Italian immigrants. This chapter reveals
why
and
how
the Cosa Nostra captured so many union locals in Gotham. Demographics
and the labor movement converged in the 1930s to fuel the Mafia's takeover of unions.

“ETHNIC SUCCESSION IN CRIME”: AN INCOMPLETE EXPLANATION FOR ORGANIZED CRIME

In 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell argued that organized crime was one of the “ladders of social mobility in America” for new immigrant groups.
⁴
Building on Bell's idea, Francis Ianni argued in his 1974 book
Black Mafia: Ethnic Succession in Organized Crime
that there was a process of “ethnic succession” in crime: as immigrant groups assimilated they were replaced by newer groups. As Ianni put it, “the Irish were succeeded in organized crime by the Jews…Italians came next…[and] they are being replaced by…blacks.”
⁵

Later writers have pointed out that the ethnic succession model is too one-dimensional. Immigrant groups were treated differently, and their respective crime syndicates emerged at different times.
⁶
Therefore, to understand why the Mafia became the dominant labor racketeers during the New Deal, we need to compare the Irish, Black, Jewish, and Italian gangsters against the backdrop of New York history.

THE EARLY GANGSTERS: WHY THE IRISH RACKETEERS GRADUALLY DISAPPEARED

The Irish immigrated first and assimilated earlier. The Irish Potato Famine of 1845–1852 caused hundreds of thousands of Irish to leave for New York by the Civil War. In Gotham, they endured anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry, urban squalor, and poverty.
⁷

By the end of the century though, the Irish were assimilating rapidly. Irish politicians were elected mayor in 1881 and 1893, and Irish voters were filling government patronage jobs.
⁸
By 1930, an astounding 52 percent of the City of New York's public-sector employees were Irish. As historian Jay Dolan put it, “Where once the refrain was ‘No Irish need apply,’ it now may as well have been ‘Only Irish need apply’!”
⁹
Meanwhile, about 21 percent of New York's Irish
were married to a non-Irish spouse, a rate three times higher than Jews and southern Italians.
¹⁰

The Irish underworld was affected by these social forces. The assimilation of Irish immigrants reduced Irish laborers in racketeer-prone industries. “We want somebody to do the dirty work; the Irish are not doing it any longer,” said a police official bluntly in 1895. “We can't get along without the Italians.”
¹¹
As Irish enclaves disappeared, so too did the Irish street gangs. When the Five Points slum was Irish, it was the home territory for Irish gangs like the Roche Guard. By the 1890s the Five Points was Italian and the Irish gangs were gone. The Hudson Dusters and the Gopher Gang were confined to the Irish West Side of Manhattan.
¹²

The Irish gangsters of South Brooklyn had a sorry ending. On December 26, 1925, Richard “Pegleg” Lonergan and five men of his White Hand gang got drunk and had a bad idea. They took taxicabs over to the Adonis Social Club, an Italian mob hangout in Brooklyn. Staggering into the hall, one boasted that his brother could “lick the whole bunch single-handed.” Unfortunately, Al Capone was sitting in the club, fresh from Chicago, where he had been fighting Irish bootleggers. A hail of bullets killed “Pegleg” Lonergan and two compatriots.
¹³

While Prohibition temporarily boosted the Irish bootleggers, the Irish mob as a whole continued to decline. Joe Valachi started out with an Irish gang before joining the Mafia. The Irish assassin Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll ended up working for Salvatore Maranzano. Madden left for Hot Springs, Arkansas in 1935.
¹⁴
Had Irish immigration peaked forty years later, organized crime may have been quite different. We might today be discussing the Dwyer, Higgins, Lonergan, Madden, and McGrath gangs of the Irish mob.

THE RACE FACTOR: WHY AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND CHINESE RACKETEERS WERE ISOLATED

Though African-American gangsters were strong in black Harlem and San Juan Hill, there were no major black labor racketeers in New York City. This was not for lack of interest. In 1935, a former FBI agent reported that Casper Holstein, Harlem's “Bolito King” (a numbers lottery), was backing union violence
in his native Virgin Islands.
¹⁵
Although Chinese tongs engaged in forms of racketeering in Chinatown, they were nonentities in Gotham's unions.
¹⁶
This was due in part to their smaller numbers, but it was also the result of prejudice in the underworld.

African-American and Chinese racketeers had relatively few entry points to union hierarchies. The building trades were notorious for preserving the Irish and Italian dominance of the construction industry at the expense of black workers. The International Longshoremen's Association did not have a single black union organizer on staff into the 1950s. It is inconceivable that any African-American longshoreman with criminal ties could have risen to be a union pier boss in the way that Anthony Anastasio did.
¹⁷