The Mob and the City (19 page)

The waste-hauling cartel originated in the mid-1930s when the mob organized the carting companies using a Teamsters local and “trade associations.” Mobster Joe Parisi created Teamsters Local 27 and retained Bernard Adelstein to serve as its president, even though Adelstein had no union experience and was an employer-side representative in the food industry. Meanwhile, the “Brooklyn Trade Waste Removers Association” (BTWRA) was organizing small carting companies. Soon political candidates were seeking the BTWRA's support, and officials like District Attorney William O'Dwyer were feting its president.
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The Cosa Nostra used Adelstein's Teamsters union and trade associations to enforce cartels over customer routes. In a perversion of the market, the carting companies “owned” their customers. They fixed routes amongst themselves and charged inflated prices to their captive customers. In March 1947, the New York Commissioner of Investigation dissolved three trade waste associations in New York City for “restricting competition by dividing territory and fixing noncompetitive prices” and for “polic[ing] the industry in order to maintain their monopoly.” It made little difference; the cartels quickly re-emerged with newly labeled associations.
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Vincent “Jimmy” Squillante ran the garbage cartel for the Mangano Family in New York City. Under the guise of the Greater New York Cartmen's Association, Squillante approached carters and promised to solve their labor problems based on his connections to Bernie Adelstein and Albert Anastasia. What Squillante was
really
offering was the customer allocation system. A carter recalled Squillante's candid explanation:

[Squillante] brought out the point of what we call property rights. In the event a man has a customer or a stop…and that customer moves from that stop, that man claims that empty store and his customer. No matter what customer shall move back into that store, that man has the property rights. No other cartman can go in there and solicit the stop.
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The Mafia's use of Bernie Adelstein's Teamsters local was integral to the scheme.
When waste haulers asked why a union was needed for family-owned businesses with “a father and 2 or 3 sons” as employees, the mobster was blunt about the union's
real
purpose. “No one would take your customers due to the fact that the union would always step in,” Squillante explained.
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The Cosa Nostra was looking for new territories for the garbage racket. So when the City of Yonkers withdrew public waste hauling from commercial establishments in 1949, mobsters were eager to expand to the affluent suburb. They met an immovable object.
¹⁰⁵

Teamsters Local 456 of Westchester County

John Acropolis was an unusual labor leader. He went to Colgate University on a basketball scholarship, and he became involved with unions while driving trucks in the summer. In 1941, Acropolis was part of a reform slate of candidates who overthrew the incumbents in union elections for Teamsters Local 456 in Westchester County. His strong will earned him the nickname “Little Caesar.” But Acropolis was a sincere unionist who ran a clean local.
¹⁰⁶

4–3: Nicholas “Cockeyed Nick” Rattenni, ca. 1930. (Used by permission of the NYC Municipal Archives)

Around 1950, mobsters Joe Parisi and Nick “Cockeyed Nick” Rattenni, and Bernie Adelstein of Teamsters Local 27, started muscling in on waste
hauling in Westchester County. “They tried to talk us into giving Parisi—that is, local 27—the jurisdiction in Westchester County of all the private carting,” recounted Everett Doyle of Local 456. When Acropolis refused, they took more extreme measures. Adelstein's Teamsters started threatening to put storekeepers out of business unless they switched from Rex Carting, whose workers were represented by Local 456, to a mobbed-up carting company. Rex Carting's office was torched and its trucks burned. Still, Rex Carting and Local 456 continued to hold out.
¹⁰⁷

2:00 a.m., August 26, 1952, Home of John Acropolis, Yonkers, New York

In the summer of 1952, Joe Parisi and Bernie Adelstein tried to strongarm Acropolis and Doyle at a labor convention in Rochester. After Adelstein outright demanded that Acropolis and Local 456 surrender its representation of Rex Carting, they got into a heated argument:

“You are not that tough. Don't think you are too tough we can't take care of you. Tougher guys than you have been taken care of,” Adelstein threatened.

“It's too bad you are crippled or I would flatten you right here,” Acropolis replied angrily to the peg-legged Adelstein.

Later, Parisi came up to Acropolis's hotel room. “I am through arguing with you,” Parisi intoned. “There is other ways of talking care of you [
sic
]. We can see that it is done.” Acropolis told him to get out of his room.
¹⁰⁸

Back home, Acropolis and his fellow union officers started receiving threats over the phone. “Don't park the car when you go home in a dark spot,” they said. “Within the next week four of you are going to die.”
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Two weeks after the Rochester labor convention, around 2 a.m. on August 26, 1952, John Acropolis was opening the door to his home after a long day. Before Acropolis could set down his car keys, someone shot him execution style twice in the back of the head.
¹¹⁰
The local police conducted interviews and tried to investigate various mobsters, but they made little progress.
¹¹¹
The case has never been solved.

With Acropolis gone, the mob quickly completed its takeover of waste hauling in Yonkers and the surrounding communities. For the next three
decades, Nick Rattenni and his mob allies controlled 90 percent of the commercial waste hauling in Westchester County, reaping millions in inflated fees.
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The Mafia's infiltration of labor unions in the 1930s was the turning point in its rise to power. While Prohibition was a thirteen-year binge, labor racketeering provided a steady diet of profits and power. Our
next chapter
looks at another new source of profits: the drug trade.

My Tradition outlaws narcotics. It had always been understood that ‘men of honor’ don't deal in narcotics.

—Joseph Bonanno,
A Man of Honor
(1983)

Salvatore Lucania knew an opportunity when he saw one. He lined his pockets with heroin and morphine, and set out to work the Lower East Side. It was spring 1916. America had just declared its first war on drugs. When doctors stopped writing prescriptions for heroin, addicts filled the streets, desperate for new suppliers. Lucania would later say that he knew what “them kind of addicts looked like.” Approaching junkies, he “told them I had some.” After a string of deals, Lucania was arrested on East 14th Street for peddling to “a dope fiend.” He was convicted and spent six months in the reformatory. But prison did not reform him. In June 1923, Lucania sold heroin to an informant for federal narcotics agents. To save himself, he tipped off the agents to a trunk of narcotics at 163 Mulberry Street in Little Italy.
¹

Lucania spent the next decade scheming his way through Prohibition. He soon traded the streets for a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, where he ran his operations as “Charles Ross.” But “Charles Ross” would become better known as Mafia boss Charles “Lucky” Luciano.
²

Luciano's drug record did not slow his rise to the top. Even when he was a boss, Luciano kept narcotics traffickers among his closest associates. This has been all but forgotten. Today, Luciano is lionized as the purported architect of the Cosa Nostra.
Time
named Luciano as one of its “100 Persons of the Century.” When Luciano's drug record is discussed at all, it is usually dismissed as a youthful indiscretion, or as a sign of his disrespect for Mafia tradition.
³
It is never considered a reflection of the Mafia itself.

The first question for this chapter then is: How has the Mafia obscured its role in America's drug trade? The chapter examines the Mafia mythology on drugs. The second, bigger question is: What was its
actual
relationship to the narcotics trade? The chapter uses facts to peel back the myths.
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THE DRUGS SCENE FROM THE GODFATHER

It is one of the most evocative scenes from
The Godfather
. The dons from around the country are assembled around a dark table. They have come to resolve whether the Mafia will enter the drug trade. The younger dons push the aging Don Vito Corleone of New York (played by the great Marlon Brando) to give his approval. He warns them against it:

I believe this drug business—is gonna destroy us in the years to come. I mean, it's not like gambling or liquor—even women—which is something that most people want nowadays, and is, ah, forbidden to them by the
pezzonovante
of the Church. Even the police departments that've helped us in the past with gambling and other things are gonna refuse to help us when it comes to narcotics.

The traditional Don Corleone, however, is outnumbered by his greedier colleagues. Don Zaluchi of Detroit rises to present the pro-drug rationale:

I also don't believe in drugs. For years I paid my people extra so they wouldn't do that kind of business. Somebody comes to them and says, “I have powders; if you put up three, four thousand dollar investment—we can make fifty thousand distributing.” So they can't resist.

Zaluchi proposes a compromise:

I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable….

BAM! [slamming his hand on the table]
:

I don't want it near schools—I don't want it sold to children! That's an
infamia
. In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people—the colored. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.

Don Barzini of Brooklyn sums up their resolution, “Traffic in drugs will be permitted, but controlled.” In the end, though, Don Corleone prevails by killing his greedy, racist rivals.
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This iconic scene from the 1972 masterpiece planted indelible images. When a young Sammy “The Bull” Gravano saw it, it reflected his ideal beliefs in the Cosa Nostra. “It was basically the way I saw the life. Where there was some honor. Like when Don Corleone, Marlon Brando, says about the drugs, sure, he owned these people, but he would lose them with that,” said Gravano.
⁶
Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola were drawing on Mafia mythology on drugs when they created this scene. The three major myths are crystalized in it.

The Myth of a Traditional Ban

The Mafia first denied having anything to do with drugs as a matter of tradition. Its members may have been bootleggers and bookies, but not dope pushers. In
The Godfather
, this myth is embodied in the character of Don Corleone, the traditional
mafioso
who stands against drugs. We can call this the
myth of a traditional ban
.

Mafiosi
have long declared that they stayed out of drugs. In his bestselling autobiography
A Man of Honor
, Mafia boss Joseph Bonanno asserted, “My Tradition outlaws narcotics. It had always been understood that ‘men of honor’ don't deal in narcotics.” Bonanno claimed that he “did not tolerate any dealings in prostitution or narcotics.”
⁷
When Frank Costello was under investigation in 1946, he held a press conference and declared, “I detest the narcotic racket and anyone connected with it. To my mind there is no one lower than a person dealing in it. It is low and filthy-trading on human misery.” Similarly, when Thomas Lucchese testified before the New York State Crime Commission in 1952, he “reserved his real indignation” for drug traffickers. “Any man who got a family should die before he goes into any of that kind of business,” Lucchese insisted.
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