The Mob and the City (16 page)

Racial distrust ran through the underworld, too. As we will see, the Corsican drug traffickers refused to work with African Americans. The black gangster Frank Lucas recalls how even after he became friends with Vincent “The Chin” Gigante in prison, they “never talked business,” since they “wouldn't have had anything to talk about in that sense.”
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SOMETIME RIVALS AND FREQUENT COLLABORATORS: THE JEWISH RACKETEERS

Only the Jewish syndicates were roughly on par with the Cosa Nostra as of the 1930s. The Jewish gangsters have been portrayed as hired help for the Mafia. They were more than that. Jewish and Italian gangsters regularly met on equal footing and pulled off schemes together. Some like Meyer Lansky and Moe Dalitz worked alongside wiseguys well into the 1960s.
¹⁹

Overall though, the Jewish crime syndicates were being surpassed by the Mafia starting roughly in the mid-1930s. Why did the Jewish labor racketeers decline?

Large-scale Jewish immigration began somewhat earlier than south Italian immigration, and Jews exited racketeer-prone industries somewhat earlier.
²⁰
Driven out by pogroms from urbanized, artisanal communities in Eastern Europe, 64 percent of Jewish immigrants were artisans or skilled workers. By comparison, south Italian immigrants, who came largely from underdeveloped rural areas, were
about 25 percent artisans and skilled workers.
²¹
The children of Jewish immigrants were far more likely to become business managers, sole proprietors, or professionals. Jews went to college at higher rates than any other group, especially after the Second World War. By 1950, 75 percent of second-generation Jews were white-collar workers, compared to 33 percent of second-generation Italians.
²²

Potential sources of new Jewish gangsters were disappearing as well. In the 1940s and ’50s, Jews flocked to the suburbs in huge numbers, causing inner-city enclaves to recede. Brownsville, Brooklyn, was once the home base of Jewish gangsters.
²³
By the time Henry Hill was growing up in Brownsville in the 1950s, he was drawn to Paul Vario's crew of the Lucchese Family.
²⁴
The Jewish gangs also appear to be less kinship-based than the Mafia “families.” Although there are dozens of books by ex-mobsters who followed relatives into the Mafia (for example, Michael Franzese's
Blood Covenant
),
²⁵
there are virtually no equivalent memoirs by Jewish criminals who followed family into the mob. As historian Jenna Weissman Joselit puts it, organized crime “was a one-generation phenomenon” for Jews in New York.
²⁶

MOB ON THE ASCENT: THE ITALIAN-AMERICAN MAFIA

The Italian-American Mafia was best positioned to take advantage of the growth of labor unions in the 1930s. The reasons for this lay in patterns of immigration and labor force participation.

South Italians in the Labor Force: An “Inbetween People”

The early Sicilian immigrants, with their dark skin and unfamiliar customs, were deemed not fully “white” in the eyes of many native-born Americans. As the scholar Robert Orsi has shown, south Italians were treated like an “inbetween people,” who were “neither securely white nor nonwhite.”
²⁷
When a construction superintendent was asked about Italian laborers at a Congressional hearing in 1892, he gave this revealing answer:

Q. You don't call a Chinaman or an Italian a white man?

A. No, sir; an Italian is a Dago.
²⁸

Those from the
Mezzogiorno
, the economically underdeveloped south of Italy, were largely agricultural or unskilled laborers, and came under the
padrone
system of contract labor.

As a result, Sicilians and other south Italians were relegated to the toughest, dirtiest jobs. As a 1931 study found, “The Italian has perhaps been the most generally abused of all the foreign born” and thus Italians “have done the hard and dangerous work in the community.”
²⁹
This is reflected in the labor force. Italians worked disproportionately in Gotham's most labor-intensive industries. They represented 40 percent or more of the building trades and the garment manufacturing, longshoring, and waste hauling industries (see
table 4–1
).

South Italians were a significant portion of the seventy thousand teamsters so critical to moving goods through the city. Most of the ten thousand independent ice and coal dealers were from southern Italy. About 90 percent of the thirteen hundred licensed pushcart peddlers of fruits and vegetables were Italians. Fully one-third of the eighteen thousand members of New York's largest musicians’ union were Italians who, along with African Americans and Jews, were essential to the nightclub business.
³¹
These were all “fragile” sectors prone to extortion or racketeering.

Why the Mafia was Poised for Labor Racketeering

Driven into the most labor-intensive jobs, Italian workers ironically came to dominate key labor forces by the 1930s (see
table 4–1
). The Little Italies were
still thriving enclaves, skeptical of police, the home base of
mafiosi
, and the recruiting grounds for young men. At the same time, second-generation Italian Americans were increasingly accepted as “white” by society. “The Chinese who seeks to leave his Chinatown is under a severe handicap not experienced by the Italian who emerges from Little Italy,” observed a sociologist in 1931.
³²
During the New Deal, Italian American workers became strong constituencies, courted by labor leaders, and in control of many union locals.
³³

These forces positioned the Mafia families for labor racketeering. Racketeers preyed on industries and unions that were most accessible to them. As historian Jenna Weissman Joselit explained, early Jewish racketeers took advantage of “the kosher poultry and garment industries while the Italians followed suit by exploiting their countrymen in the fish, fruit, and vegetable markets.”
³⁴
The modern Mafia likewise thrived in industries that were heavily southern Italian.
³⁵

What explains this connection? There are multiple reasons:

First, union locals comprised of Italian workers demanded to be represented by Italian labor leaders. This limited rival Irish and Jewish racketeers. The Irish presidents of the ILA ceded the Brooklyn locals to Italian mobsters for this very reason. “[President] Teddy [Gleason] is still Irish. You understand? He joined forces because he got no choice,” said racketeer Sonny Montella on a surveillance bug.
³⁶
In the construction industry, while Irish leaders held on to the highest skilled building trades, there were union locals made up entirely of Italians, some of which came under the influence of
mafiosi
.
³⁷

Second, Italian
mafiosi
could call on neighborhood and kinship ties in Italian labor forces—“networking” in today's parlance. ILA official Emil Camarda had known Mafia boss Vincent Mangano from growing up together in Sicily. One of his successors, ILA Local 1814 official Anthony Scotto, had as an in-law Albert Anastasia. When the boxer Rocky Graziano was turning professional, connected guys in the neighborhood introduced him to Eddie Coco, a mob associate, and told the young fighter that Coco would be his new manager.
³⁸

Third, Italian mobsters could conversely apply social pressures to roll over dissidents. When John Montesano, the owner of a family waste-hauling business, wanted to get out of a partnership with a mobbed-up carter, the Mafia demanded he pay a gratuitous $5,000 fee. Montesano was pressured into paying by a blood relative who also happened to be a member of the mob. “What is
wrong with you, kid? Every time I turn around, you are in trouble,” his relative warned.
³⁹
Similarly, it was extremely difficult to reform the Brooklyn waterfront when so many ILA thugs and convicts lived amongst the longshoremen.

Fourth, as Italian workers became business owners in these industries, it facilitated collusive behavior between business and labor. Since the waste-hauling industry was made up of Italian families who knew each other, it was easy to form cartels to exclude outsiders.
⁴⁰
Likewise, as Italian construction workers became material men and suppliers, Mafia-run cartels flourished. Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, an ex-construction worker, transitioned easily into the building rackets as a rising member of the Gambino Family.
⁴¹

THE MAFIA'S TAKEOVER OF UNION LOCALS IN THE 1930s

The Mafia families used these entry points to emerge as the top labor racketeers in industry after industry. As we saw earlier, Italian gangsters like Paolo Vaccarelli and the Anastasio brothers took over ILA locals as the workforces changed from Irish to Italian. By the 1930s, the Cosa Nostra controlled ILA locals in South Brooklyn, Staten Island, and key Manhattan piers.

New York's construction industry saw a similar evolution. During the 1920s, the Lockwood Committee investigation uncovered “tribute” payoffs to building trades czar Robert Brindell, and business cartels engineered by the building contractors. Out of the more than five hundred defendants who were prosecuted,
none
of the labor officials, and only a small set of building contractors, were Italians. Starting in the late 1950s, scores of
mafiosi
, mob-linked labor officials, and contractors were being prosecuted or investigated for similar rackets.
⁴²

In Lower Manhattan's garment industry, the Mafia entered the industry after Italian workers opened their own garment shops. The Cosa Nostra was very conscious of the new opportunities this presented. “It used be that that this industry was all Jewish, but now the Italians are really getting into it,” John Dioguardi explained to other mobsters. “Guys like Joe Stretch [Joe Stracci] control big companies like Zimmet and Stracci.” The Mafia focused on trucking union locals in the garment district, and on diverting production to nonunion shops.
⁴³

In the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, President Daniel Tobin had once dismissed Italian immigrants as “rubbish.”
⁴⁴
As these new immigrants became truckers, the IBT organized them. Later on, Tobin began receiving death threats from mobsters seeking to “break into our local unions.”
Mafiosi
Vito Genovese and Joseph “Socks” Lanza defeated a campaign to reform IBT Local 202 by branding their opponents as Communists and making nationalist appeals to Italian teamsters. Jimmy Hoffa cut deals with Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo and John Dioguardi.
⁴⁵
IBT official Roy Williams dealt with Italian, Jewish, and some Irish mobsters because that was “the way New York is separated out anyway.”
⁴⁶

THE NEW DEAL: THE SURGE OF LABOR UNIONS IN THE 1930s

The Mafia's racketeers came to power just as the labor unions were taking off in the 1930s. Simply put, the Cosa Nostra had great timing.

After a long history of employer attacks on unions, New Deal–era legislation granted unprecedented rights and protections to labor unions.
⁴⁷
Labor union membership surged. In 1908, New York City had 240,000 union members. By 1950, union membership quadrupled to a million—upwards of one-third of Gotham's workforce.
⁴⁸

Although legitimate unionists were the main beneficiaries, the Mafia took advantage of the shift toward labor as well. In the first year of operation of the government's new Regional Labor Boards (1933–34), complaints and arbitration demands against employers were filed by none other than: Building Service Employees Local 51B, represented by George Scalise, a partner of
mafioso
Anthony Carfano;
⁴⁹
IBT Local 202, a mob-controlled trucking local in the fresh-food markets, which would see its union officials go to prison for racketeering;
⁵⁰
and Teamsters Local 138, which was controlled by Jewish racketeer Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, who used the union and a trucking association to extort payoffs in the baking industry.
⁵¹