The Mob and the City (37 page)

Albert Anastasia woke up in his own bed on Friday morning, October 25, 1957. He saw off his son Albert Jr., the law student, on his way out the door at 7:30 a.m. The mob boss got dressed in a brown suit, white shirt, and tie. He was going to meet up with his
caporegime
Vincent Squillante, and get a haircut at Arthur Grasso's barbershop at the Park Sheraton.
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At about that same time, Santo Trafficante was checking out hurriedly from the Warwick Hotel. He had an early morning flight. Trafficante would be in Florida by the afternoon.
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Before he left his house in Fort Lee, Anastasia made a phone call to Coppola in his room at the San Carlos Hotel, instructing him to place some bets. “He wanted to place some doubles,” Coppola recalled. Cappy was supposed to meet up with Albert about 11:30 a.m., on the way to place bets at the race track. Anastasia stuffed $1,900 in cash into his pockets (about $15,000 in 2013 dollars), got into Coppola's borrowed car, and drove himself to Manhattan.
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At 9:28 a.m., Anastasia pulled into a rental garage on West 54th Street. It
was a brisk fall morning in Manhattan. Anastasia met up with Vincent Squillante, and they walked over to the Park Sheraton Hotel on the corner of West 56th Street and 7th Avenue.
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On the ground floor of the Park Sheraton that same morning was boxing manager Andrew Alberti and his fighter Johnny Busso, who had a room at the hotel. At about 9:15 a.m., they went downstairs to the hotel restaurant for breakfast and mingled in the lobby. Alberti was not supposed to be managing boxers. The New York Athletic Commission had officially banned him from boxing because of his ties with mobsters. Andy Alberti was especially close to Steve Armone and Joseph Biondo of the Anastasia Family.
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10:15 A.M., OCTOBER 25, 1957, BARBERSHOP OF THE PARK SHERATON HOTEL, MANHATTAN

Albert Anastasia's favorite place for a haircut was Arthur Grasso's barbershop at the Park Sheraton. The proprietor ran an old-style barbershop with mirrored walls, chrome-and-baby-blue barber chairs, shoe shines, and skilled Italian barbers. Anastasia went there twice a month for a trim.
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At 10:15 a.m., Anastasia and Squillante walked into the barbershop and hung up their jackets. “Haircut,” Anastasia nodded. The barber escorted Anastasia over to barber chair number four with a corner window. Squillante eased into another chair for a shave.
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The proprietor Arthur Grasso came over to greet Mr. Anastasia. As the barber spread the cloth over Anastasia's white shirt, and the shoeshine polished his brown shoes, Grasso pulled up a stool to catch up with his friend. At about 10:20 a.m., Grasso got up from his stool to check the soap machine. Anastasia let his head hang limply forward so that the barber could clip behind his neck. He was completely relaxed….
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Two men in hats and aviator glasses slipped across the threshold of the barbershop, black gun barrels poking out from their coats. The lead gunman walked briskly up to the rear right side of Anastasia's chair and fired away—BANG BANG BANG! “They went off fast; sounded like firecrackers,” recalled Grasso. Anastasia bolted out of his chair in pain, breaking the chair's foot
rest as he lunged toward the mirrors. Rushing up to the left side of the chair, the second gunman emptied his revolver at the wobbling mob boss—BANG BANG BANG BANG! But it was the lead gunman who fired the fatal round: a .38-caliber bullet struck the back of Anastasia's head and lodged in the left side of his brain. Anastasia collapsed between his barber chair and the next chair to the right.
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9–5: Police photo of Anastasia Family associate Andrew Alberti, 1957. (Used by permission of the NYC Municipal Archives)

The assassins made their escape. They tried exiting through the side door, but the door was locked. The lead gunman turned around and backtracked through the main doors. “Nobody move,” warned the second gunman to the barbers crouching down in fear.
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The lead gunman dumped his .38-caliber Colt revolver in the glass vestibule of the hotel before exiting onto the sidewalk of West 55th Street. They scurried down the steps of the nearby subway station and escaped on a departing train. A city worker later found the second gunman's .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver in a waste box in the station.
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Back at the barbershop, the employees were in shock. The proprietor Arthur Grasso had literally crawled out of the shop to a ticket office next door. The only person with the presence of mind to try to help Anastasia was a physician who happened to be getting a haircut. Anastasia's upper torso was twisted over, his white shirt splattered in blood, and his face pressed onto the cold floor. The doctor checked for a pulse. Anastasia was gone.
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THE NYPD INVESTIGATION

Police responded to the scene within minutes. Flocks of newspaper reporters descended on the barbershop to cover the daytime murder of a mobster. Anthony “Tough Tony” Anastasio was notified about his brother while at his office at the International Longshoremen's Association in Brooklyn. He sped over to Manhattan. After seeing his brother on the floor, Tony left the barbershop weeping in despair.
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Although the police tried to get clear descriptions of the gunmen, some of the eyewitnesses may have been intimidated by this gangland shooting. The NYPD later conducted polygraph examinations of the barbershop employees. The polygraph examiner found “deception” in the answers of three barbers regarding whether they could positively identify the shooters. The examiner
concluded that the barber who was shaving Squillante in chair number four had lied about being unable to identify the shooters because he was in “fear for self & family,” and did not “care who knows he is lying.”
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The police never found evidence that any of them were involved. They were simply too scared to talk.

9–6: Body of Albert Anastasia in hotel barbershop, October 25, 1957. (Photo by George Silk, used by permission of Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Meanwhile, Anastasia's
caporegime
Vincent Squillante was nowhere to be found. During the shooting, Squillante had run out of the barbershop with lather dripping off his face. He subsequently refused to cooperate with the NYPD's investigation. According to the NYPD report of his 1958 interrogation, Squillante flatly “refused to answer any questions on the grounds that he might incriminate himself.”
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The police nevertheless put together descriptions of the shooters from the barbershop employees willing to talk. At 4:44 p.m. that afternoon, the NYPD sent out a Teletype message: “HOMICIDE OF ALBERT ANASTASIA, OCT 25, 1957.” The lead gunman was described as a white male around forty years old, 5’8” and 180 pounds, with “sallow complexion.” He was dressed in a grey suit and fedora hat. The second gunman was described as a white male about thirty years old, 5’5” and 150 pounds, with “light complexion” and a “thin black
pencil mustache.” He was dressed in a brown suit and hat, and had on dark green aviator glasses. Both suspects spoke American English with no foreign accent.
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THE MOBSTERS BEHIND THE PLOT

There is virtual unanimity in the underworld about who was behind the plot to kill Anastasia. “I believe that Vito Genovese worked hand in hand with [Carlo] Gambino and [Gambino deputy] Joe [Biondo],” said Joe Valachi in his 1963 testimony before Congress. Genovese went so far as to warn Valachi to “stay away from Albert's men.”
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Vincent “Fat Vinnie” Teresa stated that Vito Genovese was the “mastermind of the conspiracy,” and Carlo Gambino was the “inside man” in the plot.
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New York boss Joe Bonanno said that “the indications were that it was men within [Anastasia's] own Family.”
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Vito Genovese and Carlo Gambino had strong motives to kill Anastasia. As long as Anastasia was alive, Genovese had to worry that the volatile Albert would come after him. Eliminating Anastasia would also end any of Frank Costello's lingering notions about returning as boss. For the quietly ambitious Gambino, as the underboss of the Anastasia Family, he would be the logical successor to become the next boss once Albert was gone.
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For a long time, the NYPD focused on Santo Trafficante as a suspect in the plot.
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Trafficante was, after all, meeting with Anastasia in the days leading up to his murder. The Florida boss may have had second thoughts about letting Anastasia get a foothold in Havana. In November 1959, two years after the shooting, the NYPD was requesting that the Tampa Bay police put surveillance on Trafficante. But without the FBI's involvement, the NYPD was never able to question Trafficante in Florida or Cuba. So the investigation of him fizzled.
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THE SUSPECTED SHOOTERS

In contrast to the plotters, the identities of the shooters are still the subject of debate. This section lays out the evidence for the top suspects.

Profaci Family soldier Joseph “Crazy Joe” Gallo
told
people that he and his brother's crew were the shooters. In a 1963 article for the
Saturday Evening Post
,
a gambler named Sidney Slater said that Joey Gallo had once boasted to him in a bar, “You can just call the five of us the barbershop quintet.”
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In his 1976 tell-all book, Peter “The Greek” Diapoulos, an associate of the Gallo crew, claimed that Vito Genovese and Joseph Profaci “gave that piece of work to our crew, designating Larry and Joey Gallo and Joe Jelly [Joseph Gioielli].”
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There are strong reasons to doubt that the Gallo brothers were the actual shooters. The Gallo crew was part of the Profaci Family. The Gallos had no connections to either Vito Genovese or Carlo Gambino. Moreover, the man they called “Crazy Joe” Gallo was known as an unreliable braggart. In his 1963 article, Sidney Slater acknowledged: “It's even possible Joey was boasting, having his kind of fun.”
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The Gallo brothers were not the type of men that the Profaci Family would lend out to another mob family to execute a high-level assassination. There are more compelling suspects.

In 2001, veteran mob journalist Jerry Capeci first reported that the Anastasia assassination was carried out by a crew selected by Gambino
caporegime
Joseph Biondo.
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According to Capeci's report, the crew leader was Stephen Armone. He reported that the “primary shooter” was Stephen “Stevie Coogan” Grammauta, a then-forty-year-old heroin trafficker, and that the “second shooter” was Arnold “Witty” Wittenberg, a then-fifty-three-year-old Jewish drug dealer. Capeci cited unidentified “knowledgeable sources on both sides of the law” as the basis for his report. Given Capeci's proven track record and deep sources in the mob and law enforcement, his report must be taken seriously.
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Documentary evidence has since been discovered that corroborates the story that Steve Grammauta was the lead gunman, and that he was acting under the direction of Joseph Biondo. The documents are stored separately in the FBI records in the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, and in the NYPD's files on the Anastasia case in the New York Municipal Archives. There is no indication that the FBI and the NYPD shared these documents at the time.