The Mob and the City (30 page)

Mobsters loved precious jewelry, stylish clothes, and new automobiles, too. As a young bootlegger, Charles “Lucky” Luciano took to wearing real gold jewelry.
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The attendees of the 1957 meeting of the Mafia at Apalachin drove luxury Lincolns and Cadillacs. Gangsters wanted to signal their success in the neighborhood. “Ninety percent of mob guys come from poverty,” Vincent Teresa explained in 1973. “Now they made it. They got money, five-hundred-buck silk suits, hundred-buck shoes, ten-grand cars…[t]hey want everyone to know they've made it.”
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Ironically, many wiseguys ended up blowing their own money on gambling. “Whether we bet on horses or sports or dice or cards, gambling was like breathing for Mob guys—we couldn't live without it,” said Sal Polisi. “That's not to say everybody was good at it. Most Mob guys were chronic losers, and a lot of those who weren't were mediocre at best.”
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John Gotti was a compulsive gambler who reportedly lost $90,000 on college bowl games over a single weekend.
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Spending on the mob lifestyle often came at the expense of long-term savings or housing. “We'd cash the checks [from no-show jobs], and by Monday we'd blown the money partying or buying clothes or gambling,” recalled Henry Hill. “I said I didn't have to save it because I would always make it. And I wasn't alone,” explained Hill, who still managed to buy a house on Long Island for his wife. Other mob spouses were less lucky. “Tommy DeSimone always drove around in a brand-new car and wore expensive clothes, and he and Angela lived in a two-room tenement slum,” said Hill's wife, Karen.
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Mobsters simply spent their money on different things than responsible citizens. Indeed, the reason that reporters were surprised that John Gotti lived in a modest house in Howard Beach was that he routinely emerged from chauffeured cars in custom-made suits at some of Manhattan's finest clubs and restaurants.
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Still, the mob lifestyle was fun to them. “I like gamblin’; I like women,” said Charles Luciano when he was asked how he spent his millions. “Those are the two things that make money go fast. It came and it went.”
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Lucky Luciano's
attitude toward money was not unusual. “The money rolled in. Sometimes it went out faster than I could steal it, but I liked the life,” Vinnie Teresa explains.
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Gambling was simply a form of regular entertainment for them. “We were at the track, shooting craps in Vegas, playing cards, and betting on anything that moved. Not a thrill like it in the world,” Henry Hill recalled fondly.
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This kind of economic consumption hardly fostered wealth. But goodfellas valued it more than retirement savings. After all, a Mafia soldier never knew how long he had.

MYTHS ABOUT THE WISEGUY LIFE

Now that we've seen what the life was, we should clear up what it was not. Let us dispense with some of the major myths about being a wiseguy.

Myth Number One: “Made My Bones”

The first myth is that no one could become a “made man” until he first murdered someone for the Mafia. Mario Puzo popularized the idea in the 1969 novel
The Godfather
by having Sonny Corleone say: “I ‘made my bones’ when I was nineteen, the last time the Family had a war.”
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The phrase referred to transforming a living human into a stack of bones.
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This idea was revived by the 1997 film
Donnie Brasco
, based loosely on FBI agent Joseph Pistone's infiltration of the Bonanno Family. In the climactic (fictionalized) scene, the FBI pulls Brasco off the hit that will let him become a “made man” only seconds before the target is about to be shot.
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But in his book, Joe Pistone described a highly malleable “rule” that was routinely disregarded. Pistone recalls how
caporegimes
“sometimes lied by omission on that issue to get a guy made,” saying that “close friends or relatives” were proposed for membership despite no hits, and that some prospects just paid off their
caporegime
to get made.
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The bloodbath from such a homicidal rule makes it incredible, too. There were approximately five thousand “made men” in Gotham by the 1950s. Given that some mob hitters killed several people, for each
mafioso
to “make his bones,” the homicides would exceed five thousand victims. Yet there were under six thousand total homicides from
all
sources in New York City during the 1930s.
Even if these alleged mob corpses were spread over the 1940s and ’50s, the mayhem from that many gangland hits would have been intolerable. “It would have been impossible for every made guy to have killed for such exalted status,” concludes writer Carl Sifakis.
⁸⁶

Myth Number Two: “The Mafia's Code of
Omertà
”

Another myth is that, until recently,
mafiosi
strictly adhered to
omertà
(the code of silence). Joe Valachi is mistakenly called “the first Mob turncoat to break the Mafia's code of
omertà
.”
⁸⁷
But Valachi did not testify until 1963. Long before Valachi,
mafiosi
were singing to the G-men:

• In the 1890s, Charles “Millionaire Charlie” Matranga testified in court against rival
  mafiosi
  in New Orleans. After the Matrangas were shot up, Charlie cooperated with the police in bringing charges against Joe Provenzano. In 1890, Matranga testified that Provenzano had threatened “bloodshed all along the wharf” if he did not get a piece of the waterfront.
  ⁸⁸
  
• Francesco Siino was the boss of a 670-member
  cosche
  in southwestern Sicily. During a bloody fight with rivals, he became an informant for a
  questore
  (government official). “I know that the cause of persecution of so many sons of good mothers is none other than that infamous cop-lover Francesco Siino,” yelled a
  mafioso
  as he was being arrested.
  ⁸⁹
  
• In the 1910s, the Morello Family, the “First Family” of New York, was crippled by informants. Facing prison time for counterfeiting, Salvatore Clemente, a close confidant of the Terranova brothers, became a paid informant for the United States Secret Service. For years, Clemente fed the Secret Service a steady stream of intelligence on the Morello Family.
  ⁹⁰
  
• In 1921, New York City detective Michael Fiaschetti persuaded Bartolo Fontano to confess to a murder he participated in with a gang of
  mafiosi
  called “the Good Killers.” Fontana revealed an interstate network of mobsters, including future boss Stefano Magaddino.
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• As the drug war heated up,
  mafiosi
  began trading information to avoid charges. As we saw earlier, in 1923, none other than Charles Luciano cooperated with federal agents to stay out of prison.
  
• Then there is Nicola Gentile, who became a fugitive on drug charges in 1939. In his memoirs, Gentile boasts of exercising “superhuman control over myself” to resist interrogation. The State Department's files tell a different story: it was
  Gentile
  who was pestering the government for a deal. On March 29, 1940, a cable said Gentile had “given valuable information…and it is believed that his testimony would be valuable in pending cases.”
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• Detroit
  mafioso
  Chester LaMare, meanwhile, had been informing for the United States Secret Service in its counterfeiting investigations.
  ⁹³
  
• In 1937, Dr. Melchiorre Allegra revealed the inner workings of the Sicilian Mafia. Dr. Allegra was a physician in Sicily who became a member of the Pagliarelli Family. After he was arrested in 1937, Allegra agreed to give testimony about the Sicilian Mafia. Long before Valachi, Dr. Allegra testified about the structure, practices, and rituals of his
  cosche
  .
  ⁹⁴
  
• In 1945, Peter “Petey Spats” LaTempa was to be the key witness corroborating Ernest “The Hawk” Rupolo's confession implicating Vito Genovese in the 1934 murder of Ferdinand Boccia. LaTempa committed suicide while in protective custody.
  ⁹⁵
  
• In the early 1950s, Lucchese Family soldier Eugene Giannini was informing for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Giannini revealed secrets such as how “the mob is broken down in geographic organizations,” that Tommy Lucchese's “primary sphere of activity was in the garment center,” and that Lucchese had “group leaders” like Joseph Rosato under him. On September 20, 1952, a hit team sent by Joe Valachi shot Giannini twice in the head before symbolically dumping his body on East 107th Street.
  ⁹⁶
  
• Around the same time, Dominick “The Gap” Petrilli, ironically, was informing on Gene Giannini. “The Gap is back. He got picked up in Italy for something and made a deal with the junk agents,” warned Anthony “Tony Bender” Strollo, a lieutenant of Genovese. On December 9, 1953, three assassins murdered Petrilli at a bar in the Bronx.
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• In July 1958, Cristoforo Rubino became another informer to fall before testifying against Mafia drug traffickers. A week before he was to testify before a grand jury investigating Vito Genovese and other traffickers, Rubino was shot dead on a Brooklyn sidewalk.
  ⁹⁸
  
• In May 1962, Profaci Family dissident Larry Gallo disclosed to the FBI the existence of “The Commission,” one of the most explosive secrets of the Cosa Nostra. Gallo revealed that “JOSEPH PROFACI, THOMAS LUCHESE [
  sic
  ], CARLO GAMBINO, and VITO GENOVESE were due a high degree of respect and were members of the leadership group called ‘The Commission.’”
  ⁹⁹
  

We know there were other early informers whose names remain hidden behind black marker in redacted FBI files. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) bars the disclosure of deceased informants, even if they passed away fifty years ago. But the truth has a way of rising to the surface. Former FBI agent Anthony Villano said he knew of a dozen “member sources,” including “a couple names that would shock both the public and the LCN.”
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In coming years, we may be surprised by which Men of Honor betrayed each other to the feds.

Myth Number Three: “There's No Retiring from This”

The last major myth is that wiseguys could never leave the life. “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,” Michael Corleone laments in
The Godfather Part III
. “You took an oath. There's no retiring from this,” Tony Soprano tells a soldier who wants out in
The Sopranos
.
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Except that many wiseguys
did
retire. As of the 1950s, Joe Valachi testified that while there were two thousand active members in New York City, there were also “about 2,500 or 3,000” men who were “
inactive
members.”
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So, who were these thousands of erstwhile
mafiosi
who had left the life? They fall roughly into two categories: (1) businessmen, and (2) old men.

Some
mafiosi
found more profitable work outside crime. Take William Medico of Pittston, Pennsylvania. Medico grew up in the same Sicilian neighborhood as mob boss Russell Bufalino. He joined Bufalino's northeastern Pennsylvania family, and he was arrested several times in this youth. Then, something unusual happened: he became a successful businessman. He built Medico Industries, Inc., into one of the biggest heavy-equipment companies in Pennsylvania, even fulfilling defense contracts for the United States Army.

While Bill Medico continued to associate with the Bufalino Family, he
was preoccupied with his legitimate business. In November 1957, Medico let his cronies borrow a company car to drive to the Mafia meeting in Apalachin, but he did not bother attending himself. After Apalachin, Medico agreed to be interviewed about his business by FBI agents, who found nothing illegal. Unlike Paul Castellano's business interests, the government identified no racketeering activities associated with Medico Industries or the heavy-equipment industry in general. Bill Medico was never again charged with a crime. The wiseguy had more or less gone legit.
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Many more simply aged out of the life. When Salvatore Falcone reached his seventies he retired to Miami, Florida, like thousands of other elderly snow birds. Informants said that “due to advanced age and ill health, he has been replaced by his brother JOSEPH FALCONE of Utica, New York.” The FBI noticed that after Joseph “Staten Island Joe” Riccobono entered his seventies, he “sort of retired” to the status of “an elderly statesman.” Meanwhile, the aging
mafioso
Minetto Olivere left the Milwaukee Family for California, where he “retired and manages the local American-Italian Club in San Diego.”
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Even a turncoat could leave if he was no longer a threat. At the end of his memoirs
Vita di Capomafia
(“Life of a Mafia Boss”), Nicola Gentile renounced “my active life as a member of the honorable society,” saying he was leaving as “a lonely and embittered old man.”
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Although the Mafia considered killing him, they let him die in poverty in rural Sicily. “The rules of the Cosa Nostra aren't always carried to the extreme,” explained Antonio Calderone.
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