The Mob and the City (20 page)

The Myth of Generational Decline

As the drug convictions mounted, the families tried to blame it all on low-level, young button men. In
The Godfather
, this myth is articulated by Don Zaluchi, who laments that his soldiers were succumbing to drug money. We can call this
the myth of generational decline
.

Joe Bonanno argued that “the lure of high profits had tempted some underlings to freelance in the narcotics trade.” He suggested this was due to a generational decline. “It reflected how much ground our Traditional values had lost,” said Bonanno. His son, Bill Bonanno, echoed his father's sentiments, saying, “The ultimate prospect of big profits far outweighed the lingering attraction of old traditions—at least in the minds of newer leaders who were coming up through the Families.”
⁹
Angelo Lonardo, a former underboss in Cleveland, struck similar themes in his testimony before a Senate Committee in 1988:

It has changed since I first joined in the 1940s, and, especially, in the last few years with the growth of narcotics. Greed is causing younger members to go into narcotics without the knowledge of the Families. These younger members lack the discipline and respect that made “This Thing” as strong as it once was.

When asked about the timing of this shift, Lonardo pinned it on “the late sixties or seventies.” Ironically, Lonardo himself was a convicted narcotics trafficker.
¹⁰

The Myth of Control

Others have rationalized away the Mafia's involvement in narcotics by suggesting that at least the mob controlled the drug trade as a business. This myth is articulated by Don Zaluchi (“I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable”), and Don Barzini (“Traffic in drugs will be permitted, but controlled”). The image of a grand conclave of the Mafia deciding the future of the drug trade suggests omnipotent power. We can call this
the myth of control
.

Writers have portrayed the entire drug trade as being controlled by a few, all-powerful
mafiosi
. In Martin Gosch and Richard Hammer's fictionalized “memoirs” of Lucky Luciano,
The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano
, Luciano
purportedly makes an offer to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) to “shut off the supply to America.”
¹¹
Joe Bonanno blamed the police's foiling of the Mafia's 1957 conference in Apalachin, New York, for stymieing a mob ban on narcotics. “If the 1957 meeting had gone according to plan there no doubt would have been a reaffirmation of our Tradition's opposition to narcotics,” claimed Bonanno.
¹²
As we will see, politicians have contributed to this myth by blaming the entire drug trade on a single person or mob conclave.

THE HISTORICAL RECORD OF THE MAFIA AND DRUGS

Almost nothing about the Mafia mythology on drugs is true. There was no longstanding “tradition” against drug dealing.
Mafiosi
were involved in illegal narcotics almost from the beginning. Nor was the trafficking confined to younger, low-level underlings. And contrary to the myth of control, the drug trade was messy and haphazard. Ultimately, the Mafia flooded New York City and the country with narcotics. This is how they did it.

When Narcotics Were Legal, 1890–1914

When Leroy Street needed a fix, he went to the pharmacist on Avenue B who sold him heroin manufactured by Bayer of Germany. Bayer's heroin was so pure that Leroy had to dilute it with milk sugar before injecting it into his vein. “There was one drugstore that gave us Christmas presents,” Street remembered. “It was really something: a brand-new, shining hypodermic needle with a little ribbon around it and a little card, ‘Merry Christmas.’”
¹³

New York City was an addict's paradise; drugs were cheap, easy, and everywhere. Without state or federal restrictions on heroin or cocaine, many “medicines” were little more than bottles of opiates. Coca-Cola put cocaine in its soda until 1903. And it was all legal.
¹⁴

Narcotics were, in fact, legal throughout most of the Mafia's early existence. As a British official observed, through World War I “the supply of drugs for purposes of abuse…was in most countries not actually illegal.”
¹⁵
The New York State legislature did not enact its first laws against cocaine and heroin trafficking
until 1913–1914, and the US Congress did not do so until the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. Even then, the importation of heroin into the United States was not banned completely until 1924.
¹⁶
Meanwhile, Italy did not pass its first narcotics law until 1923, a weak law with a maximum penalty of six months.
¹⁷

The Mafia could
not
have had a longstanding “tradition” against illegal narcotics trafficking because there was no such thing. When Joe Bonanno waxes on that “it had always been understood that ‘men of honor’ don't deal in narcotics,” we have to wonder whether his memories were clouded by nostalgia or intentional misdirection. Bonanno was eighteen years old before narcotics were made illegal in his native Italy. Bayer was lawfully supplying the world with heroin. So if there was some virgin era when the Mafia eschewed drug dealing, it was practically meaningless. We should dispense with the myth of tradition.

THE DAWN OF THE DRUG PROHIBITION, 1915–1939

Drug prohibition made New York City the center of the transatlantic drug trade. Enormous amounts of narcotics flowed through the Port of New York in the 1920s and ’30s. Smugglers didn't move kilos; they moved
tons
. Around Christmas 1928, a ton of narcotics was found in packing cases labeled as brushes. In April 1931, agents confiscated
three tons
of narcotics from a liner docked on the Chelsea piers. The Elias and George Eliopoulos brothers reputedly only sold narcotics in lots of a hundred kilos or more.
¹⁸

Although traffickers of every ethnicity engaged in the drug trade, Jewish gangsters initially led the trade in New York. Arnold Rothstein was the most significant trafficker in the 1920s, though he probably never touched an ounce of heroin himself. After Rothstein was shot in the Park Central Hotel in 1928, investigators found in his safe deposit boxes the financial records of his drug smuggling. (True to myth, Rothstein's widow claimed her husband's attitude to narcotics was “one of repugnance.”)
¹⁹
His deputies Irving Sobel and Yasha Katzenberg had organized new smuggling routes from Europe and Southeast Asia. The racketeer Louis “Lepke” Buchalter meanwhile had a morphine plant in the Bronx.
²⁰

Italian drug syndicates followed closely behind the Jewish traffickers. In
the 1910s, the New York Kehillah, a Jewish community organization, hired a private investigator to report on criminal activities. When the historian Alan Block analyzed the reports on drug trafficking, he found that after Jews (31 percent), the Italians were the second largest ethnic group in the cocaine trade (8 percent), and they were the only other group that formed drug syndicates. Jews and Italians often worked in combinations in a market that was “fragmented, kaleidoscopic and sprawling.”
²¹

The emergence of Italian drug syndicates is confirmed by other sources as well. Prosecutions of the Brooklyn-based Camorra (mainland Italy's counterpart to the Sicilian Mafia) revealed that the Camorristas were heavily involved in cocaine dealing in the 1910s.
²²
A 1917 report on drug trafficking found that “‘Little Italy,’ in east Harlem, is perhaps as large a market as any.” Leroy Street, the addict who lived through the dawn of the drug war, confirms an early Italian presence: “The Italians were involved in the beginning,” he recalled.
²³

Italian syndicates gradually surpassed Jewish gangsters as the dominant wholesalers in the 1930s. Both dealers and users witnessed this trend. “I was pushed out by the Italians about ’38, ’39, before the war,” remembered Charlie, an independent Italian-American dealer. “Before that—the Jews had the drugs.” Jack, a street dealer, saw Italian traffickers grow in influence in the ’30s. “But it wasn't overnight you know…infiltration was gradual,” said Jack. For Eddie, “Harlem was the main place. I'd buy from guys in the street. They were Italian, all Italian—the ones I knew anyhow,” he remembered. African-American dealers also report a takeover by Italian syndicates in the ’30s. “Who really controlled it was the bigger people on the East Side, the Sicilians…in the twenties the Jewish people had it,” recalled Curtis, a black dealer in Harlem. As a seller named Mel recounted, “When I started dealing I had Chinese and Jewish connections; later I had Italian connections.” Said Mel, “The transitions…all started between ’35 up until ’40 something, then the Italians got ahold to it.”
²⁴

At the international smuggling level, Italian traffickers had established drug contacts throughout the Mediterranean by the 1930s. During this time, the State Department collected “Name Files of Suspected Narcotics Traffickers” on smugglers from around the world. Approximately 11 percent of the name files (65 of the 563 files) were of Italian Americans or Italian nationals.
²⁵
They include known Mafia traffickers such as Vincenzo Di Stefano, who in 1935 was
convicted for smuggling nineteen kilos of gum opium he bought in Paris aboard the steamship
Conte Grande
. Mariano Marsalisi, a fifty-something Sicily-born
mafioso
and businessman, spent much of the 1930s traveling between his residences in Istanbul, Paris, and East Harlem. Marsalisi bought trunks of narcotics all over the Mediterranean for shipment back to New York. In the mid-1930s, his partners Luigi Alabiso and Frank Caruso were convicted on smuggling charges; Marsalisi himself was convicted in 1942.
²⁶

The newly formed Federal Bureau of Narcotics (hereafter “FBN”) began tracking the Mafia as it grew in influence in the 1930s. FBN agent Max Roder and George White conducted surveillance in Italian East Harlem and Little Italy along Mulberry Street, tracking
mafiosi
like Eugene Tramaglino and Joe Marone.
²⁷
White and Elmer Gentry later oversaw nationwide investigations of Lucchese Family traffickers.
²⁸
The FBN's binder of “major violators of the narcotics laws now operating in New York City” reflects this trend as well. In its February 15, 1940, binder, out of a total of 193 major violators, 84 were Italian (44 percent), and 83 (43 percent) were Jewish.
²⁹
Along with labor racketeering, drug trafficking was the Mafia's second new source of revenues in the 1930s.

Prominent
mafiosi
began getting picked up on narcotics violations in the 1930s as well. Steve Armone, a Gambino Family captain who engaged in “large scale narcotics smuggling and wholesale distribution for many years,” was convicted on narcotics charges in 1937.
³⁰
John Ormento, the Lucchese Family's top narcotics man, was first convicted in 1937. Lucky Luciano never stopped consorting with narcotics traffickers: two of Luciano's codefendants in his 1936 prostitution-ring trial were Thomas “The Bull” Pennochio, a notorious drug trafficker on Mott Street whose wife also pled guilty to selling heroin in 1938, and Ralph Liquori, who was convicted on narcotics charges in 1938. Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, the future boss of the Lucchese Family, got his name for “ducking” convictions on thirteen arrests. Nevertheless, “Tony Ducks” was finally convicted on a state narcotics charge in 1941.
³¹
Drug records did
not
impede their ascents in the Cosa Nostra.

Joey Rao was innovating another kind of drug smuggling at Welfare Island Penitentiary. The thirty-two-year-old head of the “Italian mob” ran the prison from his luxurious cell, where he donned silk clothes, ate lobster, and smoked cigars. He could stop fights just by walking into the ward. Rao's power derived
from his fierce reputation and his “dope racket.” When the Department of Corrections raided Welfare Island in January 1934, it discovered that Rao was running “a systematic traffic in narcotics within the walls.” There were so many addicted inmates that they had to be segregated in the prison hospital.
³²

5–1: Steve Armone, 1942. Armone, a
caporegime
in the Mangano/Anastasia Family, was a convicted narcotics trafficker. (Used by permission of the NYC Municipal Archives)