The Mob and the City (4 page)

1–2: Anthony “Tough Tony” Anastasio talking to ILA president Joe Ryan, 1953. Ryan upheld a “non-interference” policy with the Mafia-controlled Brooklyn ILA locals. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

Out on the Richmond docks (Staten Island), Alex “The Ox” Di Brizzi took control of the ILA locals in the early 1930s. Unlike most early
mafiosi
, Di Brizzi was born in America in 1892 and was a professional boxer before turning to a life of crime.
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The pugilist made himself president of ILA Local 920 in the early 1930s, and he was later appointed vice president of the ILA's commanding
Atlantic Coast District by Joe Ryan. Di Brizzi was caught taking thousands of dollars in cash from stevedoring companies while supposedly representing their unionized employees. “I haven't taken no money outside of gifts,” he insisted. Di Brizzi was in fact the Mangano Family's “top man” on Staten Island, overseeing loansharking and gambling operations.
²⁸

This was only the beginning of Mafia rule of the waterfront. As we will see, the mob's stranglehold on the harbor tightened in the 1940s, until it sparked a public backlash that would test its strength. For now, let us step back and scan the city from the vantage point of the Mafia.

SKIMMING SEVEN MILLION NEW YORKERS

The sheer enormity of Gotham was a catalyst for organized crime, though for reasons that have not been fully appreciated. Ever since federal census records were kept, New York City was the most heavily populated—and most
densely
populated—city of the republic. Between 1900 and 1930, Gotham's population doubled from 3,400,000 people, to 6,900,000 people. After 1940, its population never fell below seven million people. As of World War II, one of every eighteen Americans lived within the five boroughs of New York City.
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These seven million New Yorkers lived and worked disproportionately in crowded neighborhoods and industrial districts in Manhattan and Brooklyn. During the early 1900s, the Lower East Side had a higher population density than Bombay, Calcutta, or London. In Little Italy, 3,500 people lived on a single block of Elizabeth Street.
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Immigrants who grew up in these neighborhoods recall them with astonishment. “The block at 112th Street between First and Second avenues was lined with six-story buildings with families that had twelve or thirteen children. You could imagine how many people,” marveled Joseph Verdiccio of Italian East Harlem.
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To the Mafia, these were seven million pockets to pick. The mob did
not
make money by engaging in gratuitous orgies of violence. In 1912, an assistant district attorney noted that even with extortion, while Italian syndicates might threaten bombing, they drew the line at “child-snatching” because “America will not stand for kidnapping.”
³²
The Cosa Nostra preferred schemes where
money was quietly skimmed or handed over without any immediate physical force. Mafia soldier Joe Valachi distinguished the common American criminal who “usually stole” and was “taking a chance for his money” from the Italian
mafioso
(member of the Mafia) who “has racketeering on his mind.”
³³
Mafia boss Joe Bonanno likewise eschewed violent extortion in favor of collecting surplus profits through monopolies: “In my world, there was a distinction between what constitutes extortion and what does not,” explained Bonanno. “One must remember that in the economic sphere one of the objectives of a Family was to set up monopolies as far as possible.”
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The Mafia's desire for racketeering was logical: the victims were diffuse and it generated less heat from law enforcement. Rob a million dollars by gunpoint from a bank in Manhattan and soon the Federal Bureau of Investigation is on your trail. Skim a dollar off the budgets of a million New Yorkers through a racketeering scheme and hardly anyone notices. A new phrase arose: the “mob tax.” The Cosa Nostra “made sure people anted up their Mafia ‘taxes,’” said John Manca, a cop involved with the mob.
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The ability to “tax” so many people in so many different ways concentrated in one city enabled generations of mob soldiers to live off New York City.

NEW YORK'S ECONOMIC ENGINES: SMALL MANUFACTURERS AND INDUSTRY CLUSTERS

It was not only the size of Gotham that mattered; New York's tremendously productive economy, and the
kinds
of industries it attracted, fostered industrial racketeering.

The Mafia followed the money. Recent studies show that “men of honor” in Sicily were concentrated in the areas with the highest production of lemons and sulfur—the island's most valuable exports. The
cosche
(clans) were entrenched in Sicily's villages before modern industry could take hold. Their omnipresence retarded economic development on Sicily. In essence, the Sicilian Mafia cannibalized the rural island.
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By comparison, the New York families thrived by skimming only a small portion of the profits generated by the economic engines of Manhattan and
Brooklyn. Although New York was famous for its mighty banks, it was also a place that built things and fed people.
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New York City had an enormous number of small, value-added manufacturers. In 1954, there were approximately 37,500 manufacturing establishments within the five boroughs. The industrial heartland states of Ohio and Pennsylvania put together had fewer manufacturers (32,000 total). New York's manufacturing firms were incredibly small though: more than 70 percent had fewer than twenty employees.
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The garment industry was particularly famous for its tiny shops—and its racketeers. The muckraker Jacob Riis observed that the garment subcontractor was simply “a workman like his fellows…with the accidental possession of two or three sewing machines, or of credit enough to hire them, as his capital, who drums up work among the clothing-houses.” Nevertheless, collectively, they produced the large majority of the women's cloaks and men's suits in the United States.
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1–3: Men moving racks of clothes in Manhattan's garment district, 1955. (Photo by Al Ravenna, courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, New York World-Telegram and Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection)

New York's small manufacturers crowded together in hives that were extraordinarily productive. “Is it not going too far to assume that congestion is an evil?” asked Edgar Levey, president of a title insurance company, at a municipal hearing. “Each trade is apt to huddle together in one center in as concentrated a manner as possible, the dry goods trade in one district, the machinery trade in another, the leather trade in another, and so on,” Levey explained. “Business
people do this because it is to their advantage to do so.”
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Abe Feinglass, a union leader, made similar observations: “The fur industry was concentrated in a small area of 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th Street, 31st Street, and the whole area was fur because there is a need for being together, the auction, the lining people, the skin people, the fur people.” As Feinglass explained, there was “a unity of purpose that forces them together.” These men were describing, in their own words, what economists call “industry clusters” (famous examples include Hollywood's film industry, Napa Valley's wine industry, and New Jersey's pharmaceutical industry).
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New York's huge, concentrated consumer market supported a multitude of locally based, small service businesses and food companies. In the 1820s, Manhattan imported the modern restaurant in the form of a French establishment called Delmonico's. Middle-class and wealthy New Yorkers supported thousands of restaurants, cafés, and lunch counters. Moreover, less than 2 percent of New York's restaurants belonged to national chains.
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Southern and Eastern European immigrants collectively consumed large amounts of highly perishable foods, especially fresh fish, kosher meats, fruits, and vegetables. “Nearly 1 out of every 8 carloads of fruits and vegetables produced in the United States…finds its way to the markets of New York City to meet the needs of its millions of consumers,” reported the Department of Agriculture.
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Restaurants and retailers purchased most raw foods at centralized, wholesale markets within the city. As we will see, these became rich targets for racketeers.

NARROW STREETS AND BRIDGES

The proliferation of these kinds of industries and services within the environs of mid-twentieth-century Manhattan and Brooklyn led to widespread racketeering. New York City's seven million people and clustered industries overwhelmed its streets and bridges. Gangsters soon learned the importance of controlling the trucking and shipping of goods and materials.

As industries and workers gravitated to Lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn waterfront, they created transportation chokepoints. In 1875, the City Council
warned that the “over-crowding of all the streets in this section of the city, with both pedestrians and vehicles, directly and indirectly connected with commerce, has become a grievous public evil, disastrously affecting all public and private interests.” After 1910, fully half the factory workers in the city toiled in firms located below 20th Street in Manhattan.
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In addition, by the 1920s, three hundred thousand automobiles were registered in New York City. Manhattan's outdated streets and bridges were inadequate for motorized traffic on this scale. The garment center between West 34th and 42nd Streets was chronically congested as trucks loaded piecework for contractors, and unloaded finished clothes bound for distribution.
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1–4: Traffic congestion on West 35th Street, 1927. Mobsters controlled trucking vital to New York's small manufacturers. (Used by permission of the NYC Municipal Archives)

Fast and reliable shipping through the city became critical for time-sensitive industries, especially clothing (as fashions go out of style) and food (as it spoils). Virtually all of the city's 37,500 manufacturers needed shipping companies to transport their goods to retailers. “The cost of transportation of merchandise of
any and all characters, is a very sensitive point in the financing of virtually all of the most important business enterprises,” noted a police report.
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The Mafia leveraged these problems to its advantage. As we will see, the Cosa Nostra gained influence over the teamsters and longshoremen who moved goods through the city.

BULLYING THE LITTLE GUY

The small, locally owned businesses that proliferated in New York City were also much more vulnerable to gangsters than were large, distant corporations. For all their
machismo
, mobsters liked to pick on the little guys. They were easier to push around.

Small business owners were intimidated by the Mafia. New York's non-chain, independent stores were typically owned by families who still lived in the neighborhood and survived on thin profit margins. The Cosa Nostra could delay shipments of supplies, engineer labor problems, scare off customers, or physically threaten the owner and his or her family. When John Montesano got into a dispute with a mobster over his family-owned waste-hauling business, he quickly learned not to mess with
mafiosi
. “Don't you realize that they could put you out of business and they can hurt you in other ways?” warned a connected guy. “Don't forget, you have got kids.” Montesano quickly relented.
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“It was common knowledge that if you offended the Mafia you were dead,” explained Frank DiTrapani, a small businessman.
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