The Mob and the City (2 page)

Then, improbably, the
mafiosi
reconstituted themselves and returned with a vengeance. By the late 1930s, they evolved into the Cosa Nostra (“Our Thing”), the top syndicate in Gotham. By the 1950s, the Mafia families had grown to include two thousand “made men” and thousands more criminal associates entrenched throughout the economy, neighborhoods, and nightlife of New York.
²

The remarkable story of how the modern Mafia actually took power on the streets of New York remains largely hidden. Mob books gloss over this formative era with superficial “rise of” chapters that rehash dubious anecdotes from secondhand sources about the purported machinations of the bosses. Telling the Cosa Nostra's early history, however, requires digging up primary sources in archives. Moreover, the narrow obsession with the bosses (the “godfathers”) neglects the soldiers (the “button men”) who ran the rackets on the streets.

Mob history has been blurred by eighty years of Mafia mythology as well. America's greatest filmmakers have created indelible images of the mob, from Howard Hawks's
Scarface
to Martin Scorsese's gangster epics to Francis Ford
Coppola's
The Godfather
trilogy. They have been joined by “prestige dramas” such as
The Sopranos
and
Boardwalk Empire
.
Mafiosi
themselves have influenced the narrative. Al Capone in the 1920s, Joey Gallo in the 1970s, and John Gotti in the 1980s all manipulated the media. In his 1983 autobiography
A Man of Honor
(a bestseller that's still in print), Joseph Bonanno painted a romanticized portrait of himself as a benevolent “Father” who fought Americanized mobsters trying to pervert his noble “Tradition.”
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This is the first full-length book devoted specifically to uncovering the hidden history of how the street soldiers of the modern Mafia captured New York City during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. While discussing the Prohibition era of the 1920s, this book argues that the key formative decade for the Mafia was actually the 1930s. The book covers such hot topics as: Who actually founded the modern Mafia? Who shot Albert Anastasia at the Park Sheraton barbershop? And who exactly was present at the 1957 meeting of the Mafia in the town of Apalachin, New York? At the same time, the book goes beyond traditional mob topics as well. It not only documents who shot who, but explores
how
and
why
the Cosa Nostra emerged in Gotham.
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This revisionist history cuts through thickets of Mafia mythology with a machete of primary sources. It draws on the deepest collection of primary sources—many newly discovered—of any history of the modern Mafia. The primary sources include, among others, trial transcripts, investigative hearings, mayoral papers, personal memoirs, labor union records, and surveillance reports of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. These are complimented by internal files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the National Archives or obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. All of the quoted conversations in these pages are real and taken directly from primary sources. I supply extensive endnotes that allow readers to see the evidence for each chapter. This is an authentic history.
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Contrary to its image, the Mafia was
not
primarily the product of Sicilian intrigue among the godfathers. As we will see, mob bosses had limited control over these lucrative crime franchises. Rather, the Cosa Nostra was forged by the street soldiers as they adapted to the unique conditions of twentieth-century Gotham. They captured New York City by becoming part of it.

This approach places the Mafia squarely back into New York history. It
shows how the infamous “French Connection” heroin case was merely an offshoot of Mafia narcotics trafficking dating back to the dawn of America's drug war. It describes how the Cosa Nostra rode labor unions and business cartels to power during the New Deal. It shows why the Stonewall riots of 1969 were the culmination of the mob-run system of gay bars that dated to the 1930s. By replacing gauzy myths with historical evidence, we can see this extraordinary crime syndicate in a whole new light.

The scale and variety of New York City's economic activity makes it unique among the cities of America…. Its 7,835,000 residents occupy only 300 square miles and thus comprise the largest and most concentrated consumer market in the country…. It is the major gateway to America with almost half the country's exports and imports flowing through its harbor…. Although it has few giant industrial establishments, the city's multiplicity of small firms makes it the leading manufacturing city in the United States…exceeding those of Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles and Boston combined.

—New York State Department of Commerce (1951)

Is it not a fact that because New York is an island it is particularly vulnerable to pressure on the docks and trucking, with a great many people in a concentrated area? There is an enormous amount of money involved…. If you fail to deliver to a large store in New York, if no trucks deliver to them, you can pretty well squeeze them down in a couple of days and cause losses of hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars. Therefore, this is probably the most vulnerable area in the country to that type of pressure.

—Senator John F. Kennedy, McClellan Committee (1958)

Lost in books about the New York Mafia is New York City itself. Gotham has been reduced to an operatic backdrop for epic clashes between mob bosses, the FBI, and prosecutors.
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Although these conflicts are important, these books are missing half the story.

It is impossible to understand the rise of the Mafia without understanding historic New York City—a city very different than it is today. For the Cosa Nostra was in many ways a testament to New York's exceptionalism: to its tremendous economy and unique geography; to its voracious appetites and almost natural corruption. This book then is as much about New York and its peoples as it is about organized crime.

The Mafia saw unparalleled opportunities in New York City. New York had five thriving families, with another across the river in northern New Jersey. Although the Sicilian Mafia was powerful in the villages of Sicily, it never achieved the economic successes of the New York Mafia. The Sicilian
cosche
(clans) had few industrial rackets or labor unions because there was not much industry on their island. By contrast, the New York Mafia always had a bounty of goods and services ripe for the picking.

Our story begins in another city. When Gotham was a place that built things, between the 1890s and the 1950s, Lower Manhattan was the center of skilled manufacturing in the Atlantic world. Before SoHo became gleaming storefronts, its cast-iron buildings were filled with dirty factories, leather tanneries, and trucking companies. It was a city where nighthawks smoked in jazz clubs owned by gangsters who were paying off the police, and where entire neighborhoods spoke Sicilian or Yiddish, or with Irish lilts, or in the southern drawls of African-American migrants.

This chapter explores why
this city
fueled the rise of the Mafia in America.

THE PORT OF NEW YORK

It all began with the port. When ships entered the placid waters of Upper New York Bay, their crews marveled at one of the finest natural harbors on earth. Sheltered from storm swells by Long Island and Staten Island, it was an ideal
haven. Its waters were deep enough for transatlantic vessels; its weather temperate enough to allow the harbor to be open year round with little ice or fog. From the open ocean to the Manhattan piers was only seventeen miles, compared to the hundred-odd miles ships had to travel inland to reach Baltimore or Philadelphia. The building of the Erie Canal in the 1820s linked the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, drastically reducing shipping costs for New York City. It made a superb port.
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As craft industries sprang up around the harbor, and the population mushroomed, New York City became an international center of commerce. The ambitious immigrants who made it to New York in the mid-to-late nineteenth century—principally the Germans and the Irish, then later the Jews and the Italians—filled the workshops and factories in Manhattan, making it a manufacturing powerhouse. The exploding population became a huge consumer market. “The consuming power of the population of the harbor, that is of New York, Brooklyn, Bayonne, Hoboken, Jersey City, and Newark, was an important fact making for commerce and further growth,” said a shipping expert.
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These competitive advantages made the Port of New York the busiest port in the world. In old maps, Manhattan resembles a centipede, with wooden wharves and piers jutting out on all sides into the water. Nearly
half
of all the imports and exports of the United States went through the Port of New York. Moreover, the
kind
of cargo moving through it was exceptionally valuable. While Baltimore and Philadelphia were handling low-price commodities like iron ore, New York was taking in valuable raw materials for skilled manufacturing, and huge amounts of “general cargo” for finished consumer goods. By 1939, the Port of New York received 82 percent of the nation's imports of raw silk, 70 percent of the gums and resins, and 61 percent of the animal furs. Meanwhile, New York's consumers and food companies took in 72 percent of the nation's imports of cheeses, 64 percent of the wines, and 51 percent of the cocoa beans. The per-ton value of imports coming through New York was
double
that of any other port in the United States.
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The bottom line: lots of valuable goods were coursing through the New York harbor.

1–1: Removing cargo from a banana boat on a New York pier, ca. 1900. Gangsters controlled the piers on the New York waterfront. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

THE PORT'S VULNERABILITIES TO RACKETEERING

The port's magnificence helped to mask its vulnerabilities. Its problems with racketeering were first widely exposed by the famous waterfront investigations of the early 1950s later immortalized by the 1954 film
On the Waterfront
, in which Marlon Brando portrays a gritty longshoreman.

Close observers of the harbor, however, had been issuing quiet alarms since the previous century. The port had developed haphazardly along the narrow streets and piers of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, with only a single railroad freight line for waterborne cargo, and little warehouse space along the harbors. Ships floated in frustration in the harbor, waiting for openings on the narrow, overburdened piers. As early as 1871, an engineer warned: “From this insufficient
breadth of the majority of the piers, the lack of width in the river streets, and the consequent difficulty of access, this quarter of the city is entirely too crowded, and it is impossible to transact the shipping business satisfactorily.”
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Calls for improvements to the shoddy wooden wharves and bulkheads were persistently ignored. “The port, by its great natural advantages, has reached its present position among the ports of the world, in spite of the mismanagement of the docks,” warned another report in 1922.
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