The Mob and the City (32 page)

Even New York's old coroner's office, which employed the medical examiners who investigated causes of death, had corruption problems. “The coroner's office was an important one for a political machine to control. It was a place where a case could be fixed or disposed of early, before public outcry could build up,” explained coroner George LeBrun. A corrupt coroner could botch a case for others to exploit. “Even when a prosecutor went ahead and obtained an indictment, a skillful defense lawyer could make good use of the coroner's verdict in raising a question of reasonable doubt in the minds of a trial jury,” said LeBrun.
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The New York State Joint Legislative Committee on Crime conducted a study of felony arrests of organized crime figures between 1960 and 1970 in the courts around New York City. The study found that 44 percent of indictments against mobsters were dismissed before trial compared to only 11 percent of all indictments. Furthermore, of 536 organized crime figures arrested on felony charges, just 37 were sent to prison—less than 7 percent.
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The rap sheets of
mafiosi
typically have many charges, but relatively few convictions and little prison time. Before 1959, Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo was charged with felonies eleven different times, but he was convicted only once and spent a total of six months in prison. Alex Di Brizzi was arrested twenty-three times on charges ranging from bookmaking to felony assault, but he got away with fines and suspended sentences through 1958. We will never know how many of these cases were fixed.
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“MOUTHPIECES FOR THE MOB”: CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEYS

When all else failed, and a major felony was set for trial,
mafiosi
turned to criminal defense attorneys to talk them out of trouble. The New York bar had had criminal defense specialists since the notorious firm of Howe & Hummel was put on retainer by Frederika “Mother” Mandelbaum, Gotham's biggest fence.
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Starting during Prohibition, gangsters relied more and more on criminal defense
lawyers or “mouthpieces,” as the goodfellas called them. These “mouthpieces for the mob” became essential to the New York Mafia.
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The Mob Temptation for Lawyers

Mobsters were unlike most clients. They often led intriguing lives on the edge of infamy. Defense lawyers knew the complications—and temptations—of representing gangsters.

Samuel S. Leibowitz was one of the finest criminal defense lawyers (and later federal judges) of the twentieth century. During Prohibition, he obtained acquittals of Al Capone and Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll among other gangsters. Although Leibowitz made no apologies for providing a zealous defense, he knew the hazards of representing gangsters. “The doctor uses all the skill and scientific knowledge at his command, yet takes every precaution not to become infected by the germs of his patient,” described Leibowitz. He expanded on his colorful analogy:

Figuratively speaking, I made it my business to don a “white gown” to avoid exposure to antisocial germs. The regrettable fact is that a few specialists in this field neglected to distinguish between their professional obligations and their social life and made the mistake of not wearing a “white gown” any of the time. At the end of the legal day's work they hobnobbed on intimate terms with their virulent clients and thus brought disgrace on themselves and dishonor on a noble profession.
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When Washington lawyer Edward Bennett Williams took on Frank Costello as a client, he was fascinated when Costello took him to the Copacabana and introduced him to celebrities and bookmakers. However, Williams learned to keep his mob clients at arm's length. “You need me. I don't need you,” he told them.
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Florida defense attorney Frank Ragano regretted getting too close to clients like
mafiosi
Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante. “My gravest error as a lawyer was merging a professional life with a personal life,” said Ragano. “I gradually began to think like them and to rationalize their aberrant behavior.”
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Mob Lawyers

Other lawyers crossed over the line from professional advocate to partners in crime. J. Richard “Dixie” Davis left a white-shoe law firm in Manhattan for the excitement of representing Harlem numbers runners, whose defenses were paid for by high-level gangsters. Davis was by all accounts an excellent defense attorney. “Davis was a very bright, imaginative, twisted-minded, young man,” said Thomas E. Dewey, who faced him in court. By thirty, Davis had turned himself into a leading defense lawyer and married a Broadway showgirl.
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Then Davis crossed the line between defending his clients in court and helping them run the Harlem numbers lottery. Davis began hanging out with his top client Dutch Schultz, a trigger-happy gangster with links to the Mafia. Late one night, in a cheap hotel room, Davis witnessed Dutch Schultz put a gun into the mouth of one of his underlings…and fire. “I was scared. It is very unhealthy to be an eyewitness to a murder when a man like Schultz is the killer,” said Davis. “I kept thinking the mess I was in, and I couldn't help longing for the days when I was just a kid mouthpiece, making lots of money as a shyster in the magistrate's court.”
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Dewey brought an indictment against Davis to pressure him to testify not only against the gangsters but also against Tammany Hall district leader James “Jimmy” Hines. Hines had been providing protection to the Harlem numbers lottery by telling judges he got appointed to dismiss charges against Schultz's men. “Davis was nothing but an expendable and replaceable young lawyer. They could have found another one of those, but Hines was at the top,” explained Dewey.
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Davis's testimony ultimately helped convict Hines. Though he avoided a long sentence, J. Richard “Dixie” Davis was disbarred in 1937, his legal career over at thirty-two.
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Other attorneys dashed across the line to criminality. Frank DeSimone was literally a mob lawyer. He graduated from the University of Southern California School of Law in 1932, passed the bar, and practiced law in Los Angeles for the next twenty years. In that time, DeSimone quietly rose to become boss of the Los Angeles Mafia family. DeSimone developed contacts with the Lucchese Family of New York, and was called “the lawyer” by informants.
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Criminal defense attorney Robert Cooley became enmeshed in the world
of the Chicago Outfit in the 1970s and ’80s. Mobsters called Cooley “the mechanic” for his ability to fix cases. “For the first eleven years of my legal career, almost every day I gave out bribes—and not just to judges,” admitted Robert Cooley. He started socializing with mobsters, too. “Four times, I shared a last meal with a gangster before he went off to his death. Each one was calm and unsuspecting,” Cooley recounted. Sickened by the violence, Cooley became an informant for the government and testified as a witness against dozens of mobsters.
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Defense Lawyer Tactics: Playing the Identity Card

Most criminal defense attorneys did their work within the bounds of the law and were unrepentant about providing a zealous defense. Asked how he could represent accused mobsters, Bobby Simone cites the defense lawyer's creed: “The simple answer—the presumption of innocence owed every criminal defendant and the proposition that no one is guilty until and unless a jury, or in some cases a judge, says so after a fair trial.”
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Others argued that they were defending constitutional rights. “Strike Force attorneys and FBI agents acted like they were doing God's work, and therefore didn't have to play by the rules,” argued Las Vegas mob lawyer (and now mayor) Oscar Goodman. “That's not what the Constitution says, nor is it what the Bill of Rights is about.”
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The defense lawyer's tactics were not always pretty. A favorite tactic of some was playing the ethnic-identity card. Italian immigrants had often been grotesquely attacked as criminals by the press and politicians. The largest mass lynching in American history took place in 1890 in New Orleans when eleven Italians were hung by a mob after their acquittals and mistrials on charges of assassinating police chief David Hennessy. Modern defense lawyers, however, tried to portray hardened, wealthy
mafiosi
as nothing more than innocent ethnic martyrs. After a meeting of the Mafia was discovered in Apalachin, New York, in November 1957, attorneys for the mob attendees played the ethnic card aggressively.
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During the trial of the Apalachin attendees, the defense made this a central theme. “All these men are Italian. Is that why they are here in this courtroom?” asserted a defense lawyer at trial. “What's on trial here? The Sons of Italy?” another lawyer asked rhetorically.
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Mob front groups used similar tactics. In 1960, a member of an “Italian-American service organization,” identified as “William Bonanno, a wholesale food distributor from Tucson, Ariz.,” condemned the “stereotyping of Italian-Americans as gangsters,” which he said was “causing financial, social and moral damage to the whole Italian-American community.” Bonanno, the “food distributor,” was in fact a gangster who later peddled memoirs romanticizing his life in the Mafia.
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Criminal defense lawyers and mob front groups put the Department of Justice on the defensive with accusations of anti-Italian bias. “In the 1960s and 1970s, after we publicly entered the battle, the FBI was constantly attacked as being anti-Italian because of our efforts to break La Cosa Nostra,” said FBI agent Dennis Griffin. “Defense attorneys attacked me personally with this charge when I was on the witness stand testifying against Mob leaders.”
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Mafia boss Joseph Colombo formed the “Italian-American Civil Rights League” to protest outside the Manhattan office of the FBI. “Mafia, what's the Mafia?” said Colombo. “There is not a Mafia.” Cowed by the protests, Attorney General John Mitchell barred the Department of Justice from using the words “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra.”
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Not everyone bought it though. State senator John Marchi denounced the Civil Rights League, saying, “Italian-Americans have been had.”
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Defending the Constitution

Other times, the mob's lawyers were defending important constitutional protections. After the media turned Frank Costello into a high-profile target, the police ran nonspecific, twenty-four-hour wiretaps not only on his home telephone, but on all pay phones in restaurants he frequented. Police then transcribed the conversations on the phones, whether Costello was a participant or not. Costello's attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, who read hundreds of these transcripts, explained the Fourth Amendment problems with this. “Husband-and-wife calls were monitored. The tender words of sweethearts were heard by a third ear. In short, hundreds of wholly innocent, law-abiding and unsuspecting citizens were deprived of their right to communicate privately,” recounted Williams. As Costello's attorney, Williams spent years challenging this and other due process issues, culminating in two appearances at the Supreme Court.
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Perhaps the most interesting legal quandary was the 1959 case against the Apalachin attendees. Dozens of high-level mobsters were caught in upstate New York at what we now know was a crucial meeting of the Cosa Nostra. The
mafiosi
were not there just for a barbeque. But prosecutors could not get any of the wiseguys to flip and testify about the criminal aims of the meeting. Nonetheless, a federal jury convicted them on an attenuated theory of conspiracy. The Court of Appeals reversed on the ground that the government had not met its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The Court was troubled by the theory of the case. As one of the judges pointed out, “The indictment did not allege what the November 14, 1957 gathering at Apalachin was about, and the government stated at the beginning of the trial could it could present no evidence of its purpose.”
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Most defense lawyers for the mob were simply asserting guarantees of the United States Constitution, which provides more robust protections and due process rights for the accused than any other written constitution. Mobsters certainly recognized its importance. After he was deported to Italy, Charles Luciano complained about how Italian police once held him for eight days without a formal charge. “It couldn't happen in the good old days in New York. My lawyer woulda had me out on bail inside forty-eight hours. These people don't know what the word bail means,” said Luciano.
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RECORD ON THE MAFIA: LOCAL FAILURE vs. STATE AND FEDERAL SUCCESS

Perhaps the clearest sign of the paralysis of local law enforcement is comparing its weak record to that of state and federal law enforcement. With few exceptions, the most significant and effective crackdowns on early
mafiosi
were carried out by federal or state officials.

The Morello Family was decimated by the United States Secret Service, not by the NYPD. Al Capone was brought down by the United States Treasury Department's tax unit, not by the Chicago police. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics obtained far more convictions of New York Mafia drug traffickers than the local narcotics unit. The 1957 Apalachin meeting was uncovered by
the New York State Police and the Treasury Department's Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Unit.