The Mob and the City (43 page)

Robert Kennedy's appointment as United States attorney general ratcheted up the pressure on the FBI. “Through well placed informants we must infiltrate organized crime groups to the same degree that we have been able to penetrate the Communist Party and other subversive organizations,” Hoover instructed the FBI's field offices on March 1, 1961. FBI field agents developed
high-level moles within the Mafia through the FBI's new Top Echelon Criminal Informant Program. Field agents planted dozens more electronic surveillance (ELSUR) bugs into the bars, social clubs, and backroom offices of
mafiosi
. Then, in 1963, the FBI flipped Genovese Family soldier Joe Valachi and persuaded him to testify publicly about the Mafia. Suddenly, the Cosa Nostra's innermost secrets were being revealed on national television.
¹²⁵

The lives of the wiseguys would never be the same again.

Nostalgia is…a rust of memory.

—Robert Nisbet (1982)

When they were struggling to survive in the 1910s, Joe Masseria, Charles Luciano, and Giuseppe Morello could scarcely have imagined that their lives would someday become a canvas for American popular culture. The Mafia has been the backdrop used to explore themes of family and immigration (
The Godfather
), America's coming of age (
Boardwalk Empire
), and suburban angst and mortality (
The Sopranos
). It is used to sell rap music (
Yo Gotti
), “reality television” (
Mob Wives
), video games (
Mafia II
), and even a mobster “lifestyle” magazine (
Mob Candy
).

This rests on a thick layer of nostalgia. Perhaps the greatest myth about the Mafia is that its members were a special band of brothers, that they were “Men of Honor” who forged a loyal fraternity of goodfellows. Mobsters like Joe and his son Bill Bonanno have peddled such stories for decades. When people learn you are writing a book on the Mafia, you often hear some variation of the following: “I happen to think that the Mafia did some good,” or “at least they had a code,” or “they were honorable when they first started out.”

This book is skeptical that there was ever a golden era of gangsters. The Mafia that emerges from the primary sources is an opportunistic crime syndicate that rose up within the historical context of New York City. The wiseguys broke every one of their “rules,” trafficked drugs almost from the beginning, became government informers, betrayed each other, lied, and cheated. In other words, they were not much different than the younger
mafiosi
who followed.

To be sure, the Mafia families were extraordinary crime syndicates. The Cosa
Nostra was unquestionably the strongest criminal organization in New York. The Mafia families were in control of major union locals in Gotham and were linked to national unions like the Teamsters; they were the dominant narcotics wholesalers throughout the eastern half of the United States; they effectively managed professional boxing, reaped the Harlem numbers lottery, neutralized the local police, and were feared and respected by other criminals.

But the truth is that the Mafia was very much propelled by the forces of New York history. Simply put, the Italian-American gangsters had terrific luck. They were on the verge of extinction in the 1910s, only to see their fortunes reversed by the passage of Prohibition. They were then poised demographically to take over New York's unions just as the labor movement was surging in the 1930s. Gotham was an embarrassment of riches for sophisticated racketeers. They could extract payoffs from the huge waterfront, skim profits from bustling industries, cater to the Manhattan nightlife, and feed the appetites of thousands of heroin addicts.

It is time to put the Mafia back into the history of New York City. The
mafiosi
did not emerge out of thin air and take over by sheer force of will. This was very much New York's Mafia.

INTRODUCTION:
THE GODFATHER
VS.
NEW YORK HISTORY

1
. For the history of the Morellos, see Mike Dash,
The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia
(New York: Random House, 2009), pp. ix–x, 222–24, 305–306.

2
.
Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Gov. Operations: Organized Crime and the Illicit Traffic in Narcotics
, Senate, 88th Cong., 1st Sess., 270–73 (1963) (testimony of Joseph Valachi).

3
.
New York Times
, March 20, 1971, July 22, 1975;
Time
, September 29, 1986; Joseph Bonanno with Sergio Lalli,
A Man of Honor: The Autobiography of Joseph Bonanno
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).

4
. New York University Law Professor James B. Jacobs first showed me that serious research could be done on the Mafia. In the summer of 1997, I worked as his research assistant while he worked on his book
Gotham Unbound: How New York City Was Liberated from the Grip of Organized Crime
(New York: New York University Press, 1999), which focused on initiatives in the 1980s and ’90s by the Justice Department and the Giuliani administration to purge the Mafia from six industries. We also coauthored an article on an anti-Mafia agency called the Trade Waste Commission. James B. Jacobs and Alex Hortis, “New York City as Organized Crime Fighter,”
New York Law School Law Review
, 42, nos. 3–4 (1998): 1069–92, reprinted in
Organized Crime: Critical Concepts in Criminology
, vol. 4, ed. Frederico Varese (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 179–200.

5
. I am inspired by such authors as Mike Dash and Jerry Capeci, who combine exhaustive research with compelling narrative history. Mike Dash,
First Family
, pp. x–xi; Jerry Capeci and Tom Robbins,
Mob Boss: The Life of Little Al D'Arco, the Man Who Brought Down the Mafia
(New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2013).

CHAPTER 1: A CITY BUILT FOR THE MOB

1
. For example, Anthony M. DeStefano,
King of the Godfathers: Joseph Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family
(New York: Pinnacle, 2007). Even Selwyn Raab's fine journalistic account
Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires
(New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2005) focuses on Mafia leaders from the 1960s onward.

2
. Thomas E. Rush,
The Port of New York
(New York: Doubleday, 1920), pp. 11–12; New York State Crime Commission,
Study of the Port of New York
(Albany, NY: n.p., 1953), p. 17; James T. Fisher,
On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 1.