The Mob and the City (38 page)

In an FBI report dated January 3, 1963, a confidential Mafia informant told the FBI that Joseph Biondo and Andrew Alberti helped organize the crew, and that the contract was given to “Steve Grammatula [
sic
]” whose “nickname is Steve Coogan.” The informant explained that since “Anastasia frequented the barbershop at the Park Sheraton Hotel,” the crew arranged so that “the guns were in the hotel room of Johnny Busso /PH/, a fighter.” (The informant did
not
assert
that Busso knew of the assassination plot, and there is no evidence that Busso was in any way involved). The informant stated that “Grammatula [
sic
] went to the hotel, got the guns, shot Anastasia, and caught [the] subway and went home.”
⁸²
The informant's account is all the more credible because Grammauta was never publicly identified as a suspect, and Alberti's and Busso's presence that morning at the Park Sheraton Hotel was not reported by the newspapers. The informant was therefore not simply repeating what he had read in the papers.
⁸³

The NYPD's internal files on the Anastasia investigation confirm that Andrew Alberti and Johnny Busso had a room at the Park Sheraton hotel, and they were in the lobby that morning. According to the NYPD's report on its interrogation of Busso, the boxer recalled how “on the morning of October 25, 1957, he received a phone call in his room from Andrew Alberti,” who then “came up to his room.” They went down for breakfast in the hotel restaurant at “about 9 or 9:15 AM.” Busso said that he “spoke with numerous persons in the lobby of the hotel that morning in question, but does not remember Alberti introducing him to [Anastasia].”
⁸⁴
For his part, Andy Alberti admitted that he ran into Anastasia that morning in the Park Sheraton lobby, and that they had a conversation during which Anastasia “spoke…about Busso's coming fight at the Garden.” Although Alberti claimed he had no information on the murder, he also told the police that “he would not give any information, even if he possessed it, pertaining to this or any other crime.” The police knew they were dealing with a mobster: the report on Alberti notes that his associates “include Joseph and Stephen Armone.”
⁸⁵
In November 1964, Alberti would be killed by a shotgun blast in what the police believed was a gangland murder.
⁸⁶

Steve Grammauta's background and appearance made him a logical suspect as the lead gunman. Grammauta was a low-profile
mafioso
with close ties to the Armone brothers of the future Gambino Family. He would be convicted with Joseph Armone (the brother of Stephen Armone) for running a heroin ring that they operated between 1956 and 1960. Furthermore, Grammauta fits the description of the first gunman, a “white male around forty-years-old” (Grammauta was forty in October 1957) with a “sallow complexion” (the man nicknamed “Stevie Coogan” had pale skin).
⁸⁷

Based on these sources, we can broadly outline the assassination plot. By the fall of 1957, the grievances against Albert Anastasia have reached a boiling
point. Carlo Gambino's trusted lieutenant Joseph Biondo secretly assembles a team to eliminate the boss. Biondo selects his close associate Steve Armone to lead a crew of gunmen. They know that Anastasia gets his hair cut twice a month at the barbershop on the ground floor of the Park Sheraton hotel. So they stash revolvers in the room of one of Andy Alberti's fighters, who stay at the hotel before fights. They confirm that the boss is getting his regular trim on the morning of Friday, October 25, 1957. Steve Grammauta and the second gunman get the revolvers from the hotel room, put on their hats and aviator glasses, and head downstairs. At about 10:20 a.m., they slip across the threshold of the barbershop….
⁸⁸

THE AFTERMATH

“ANASTASIA SLAIN IN A HOTEL HERE,” read the
New York Times
.
⁸⁹
The murder of Albert Anastasia shook up the underworld. There had not been a public assassination of a New York Mafia boss since the murder of Salvatore Maranzano in September 1931. (Vince Mangano's killing in 1951 was carried out in secret).
⁹⁰

Carlo Gambino and his lieutenants moved swiftly to claim the mantle of leadership. As Joe Bonanno discovered, after Anastasia was killed, the plot's “second phase involved the quick recognition of Carlo Gambino as Anastasia's successor.”
⁹¹
With the backing of Vito Genovese and Tommy Lucchese, Gambino became the boss of the new Gambino Family. Gambino named Joe Biondo as his underboss as reward for his ruthless service.
⁹²

The murder and replacement of Anastasia took place without major opposition. By October 1957, few wiseguys had any desire to avenge Anastasia.
⁹³
The ferocity of “The Executioner” shocked even other mobsters, who wondered when they might be his next victim. The murders of Vincent and Philip Mangano, the dumping of Peter Panto in a lime pit, the unpredictable outbursts of rage—it was too much even for his closest associates. “I ate from the same table as Albert and came from the same womb, but I know he killed many men and he deserved to die,” said his brother Anthony Anastasio to FBI agents in a confidential conversation.
⁹⁴

With all the upheaval in New York, the Commission called a national meeting in 1957. The main purposes of the meeting would be to affirm Vito Genovese's accession as boss of the new Genovese Family and to introduce “Gambino to the important men in our world.”
⁹⁵
Don Vito wanted to hold the meeting in Chicago. But Stefano Magaddino of Buffalo persuaded the Commission to hold it at his friend Joseph Barbara's fifty-eight-acre estate in upstate New York. Barbara's place was located outside the factory town of Endicott in a village called Apalachin.
⁹⁶

There's the state troopers.

—Mrs. Josephine Barbara (1957)

We didn't have any evidence of a national syndicate. Not until they held that hoodlum conference up in Apalachin, New York, back in ’57.

—FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (1971)

1944, ROUTE 17, OUTSIDE ENDICOTT, NEW YORK

The thief just wanted some company gas. With American soldiers fighting the
Wehrmacht
and Imperial Japan, the home front was rationing petroleum. But somehow Joseph Barbara Sr., a businessman who owned a bottling plant in Endicott, New York, always had extra gasoline. So an employee took a company truck with two containers of gas to Route 17 outside Endicott, where he stashed them in some bushes.
¹

Just then, state trooper Edgar D. Croswell was driving by on patrol. Born in Woodstock, New York, Croswell graduated from business college in the teeth of the Great Depression and took jobs with local police and as a detective in Sears, Roebuck's mail-order division. When he was twenty-eight years old, in August 1941, Croswell accepted an assignment with the New York State Police and spent the war patrolling southern New York out of Troop C's substation in Vestal, New York. It was a good fit. Six feet tall and angular, with piercing grey eyes, Croswell was something of a loner and a workaholic; he once said,
“My hobby is police work.” A soft-spoken man who disliked guns, he believed in relentless investigations.
²

Trooper Croswell was
not
a trifling man. So when the man coming out of the bushes gave only vague answers to his questions, Croswell searched the bushes and found the gas. Nearby was a truck registered to Mission Beverage Company. Back at the police substation, the thief confessed to stealing the gas. Croswell called the company's owner, a Mr. Joseph Barbara.

Trooper Croswell's first encounter with Joe Barbara was very strange. When Barbara arrived at the substation, Croswell noticed the businessman had a revolver on his belt. Barbara was brusque and dismissive, too. “As soon as I explained the situation to him he wanted no part of it. He didn't want the man arrested or anything done,” recalled Croswell. “Back in 1944 or 1945, 10 gallons of gasoline was pretty precious. It just aroused my suspicion who he was.”
³

Croswell did some digging on Barbara. The Pennsylvania police had thick files on him. Barbara lived a gangster's version of the American dream. Barbara arrived at Ellis Island in 1921 when he was fifteen years old, and like many Sicilian immigrants, he found work in the Endicott-Johnson Shoe factories in the “Triple Cities” of Binghamton, Endicott, and Johnson City. Barbara, however, had no desire to end his days as a broken-down cobbler. In 1928, he joined up with Sicilian
mafiosi
in the lawless coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania, where he became a bootlegger, and was arrested as a prime suspect in three brutal murders, including one by strangulation. In 1933, Barbara returned to Endicott with his illegal earnings. He promptly started a bottling company, married a pretty local girl, and took on all the appearances of a legitimate businessman.
⁴

With no charges to press, Croswell dropped the gas matter. But he would remember Barbara.

1949, TELEPHONE WIRETAP ON JOSEPH BARBARA'S HOUSE, APALACHIN, NEW YORK

Croswell's views on Joe Barbara hardened after their first encounter. In 1946, Barbara pled guilty to violating federal regulations in hoarding 300,000 pounds
of sugar. This rationing offense meant something else to Croswell: Barbara, the former bootlegger, had 150 tons of sugar to produce moonshine liquor. There was also the company he kept. “Every investigation of any importance that we conducted in that area concerning vice or gambling seemed to center around Joseph Barbara and the people who associated with him,” Croswell recounted. The ostensible business executive surrounded himself with men like: Anthony “Guv” Guarnieri, who had served time for gun and gambling crimes; Patsy Turrigiano, a bootlegger and moonshiner; and Emanuel Zicari, a convicted counterfeiter. Behind the respectable façade, Barbara the businessman still had another foot in the underworld.
⁵

Croswell began investigating Barbara with a doggedness bordering on obsession. Around 1949, he obtained a court order to wiretap Barbara's telephone. This was the first of several wiretaps that the New York State Police and the Broome County district attorney ran on Barbara's home intermittently between 1949 and 1956. Croswell would go the DA's office to read transcripts of Barbara's latest phone conversations. It was discovered that Barbara was calling major racketeers from around the country, such as Russell Bufalino of Pennsylvania. But the
mafiosi
kept their conversations short and nonincriminating: “That matter we talk about, we fix,” and “Okay, I meeta you at where we say.”
⁶

Next, through undisclosed means, Croswell and a local reporter acquired Barbara's bank records. Large sums of money unconnected to any business transaction were being transferred one way into Barbara's account from men in Pennsylvania.
⁷
Still, no proof of a crime.

So Croswell took a fateful measure: twice weekly, he began personally spying on Barbara's estate. “As a steady routine I took to driving by his house and jotting down the license numbers of the visiting cars and cross-checking their owners,” said Croswell. Barbara would turn on the floodlights and look blinkered-eyed out his window at the statie. Croswell admitted that such actions were part of “a little campaign of harassment we carried on against Barbara for years.”
⁸

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18, 1956, ROUTE 17, OUTSIDE OF WINDSOR, NEW YORK

The Southern Tier region of New York was enjoying a glorious Indian summer the third week of October 1956, with temperatures reaching the seventies and fall colors at their peak, but the white Oldsmobile flashing by on Route 17 was not taking a leisurely drive.
⁹

State Trooper Fred Leibe chased the speeding car for five miles before forcing it to the side of the highway outside Windsor, New York. The angry driver got out and walked to the back of the car. He was a short, paunchy man with beady eyes, who did
not
match the physical description on his driver's license. When Leibe asked the speeder the date of birth on “his” license, he got it wrong. Leibe arrested him. He told the three riders in the white Oldsmobile to follow his squad car back to the substation, but they ducked away on a highway exit.
¹⁰