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BOOK: The Mafia Encyclopedia

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Page xi

eavesdropping evidenceto deny the existence of an American Mafia and a national commission. The war declared on the Italian Mafia by Pope John Paul II and the onset of trials for hundreds of mafiosi in Italy in 1986 similarly eliminate the basic argument about the existence of the Honored Society in that country, reducing the claims of critics to a matter of semantics.

In many respects, however, the proof is still sketchy. Written records, especially the selfserving memoirs and reminiscenses of criminals, must be scrutinized carefully. Errors and deliberate misrepresentations in such reminiscenses are to be suspected. Thus the serious student of crime must constantly search for correllating documentation when drawing from such sourcesnot always an easy task from material proclaimed to be "exclusive revelations." Not surprisingly, also, there is a certain contentiousness among the authors of rival books and in their critical evaluations of each other's works. The problems in documentation and the confusions of fact are apparent in numerous examples.

Indeed, such confusion surrounds probably the most controversial, yet among the most important, crime books published in recent years
The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano
, written in 1974 by Martin A. Gosch and Richard Hammer, formerly a reporter for the
New York Times
. On December 17, 1974, Nicholas Gage, in a front-page article in the
Times
, questioned the authenticity of the book by citing errors of fact. This creates a serious problem for a crime historian. Is the Luciano testament to be thrown out wholesale or are Gage's and others' criticisms merely limited to specific details, misrepresentations or even lapses of memory by an aging and ill Luciano, or poor research by one or both of the authors? (The claim by many writers of true crime that their subjects had camera-like memories and were never caught in a lie need hardly be accepted at face value. Errors in crime biographies as well as those in books written by law-enforcement officials are probably greater than in any other field.)

Penthouse
magazine, which excerpted the Luciano book before publication, made a serious misrepresentation, acknowledged in part by the book's publisher, Littie, Brown, that the book was based on tapes made by Luciano. Author Hammer (by the time the book appeared Gosch had died) never claimed there were tapes of Luciano talking but rather that Gosch had taped his notes which Hammer found impossible to read. Hammer was quoted by the
Times
as saying, "Luciano would have had to be out of his mind to sit with a tape recorder. What guy in his position would ..."

As a counterpoint, Gage wrote: "According to Peter Maas, Frank Costello, Luciano's successor as the top Mafia boss, agreed to such an arrangement shortly before he died in 1973. Mr. Maas, author of 'The Valachi Papers' said Mr. Costello agreed to recount his life on tape and sign verifying documents for a prospective memoir Mr. Maas would write.

"Mr. Costello's death cut short the collaboration and Mr. Maas said he abandoned the project."

In any evaluation of Gage's methodology, it must be noted that if there had been any Luciano tapes, the mob boss would have, as the book indicated, admitted complicity in a number of murdersfor which there was no statute of limitations. There is nothing contributed on the record by Gage or Maas that puts the Costello tapes on the same qualitative level.

The question remains: Does the Luciano testament, backed up by basically similar reminiscenses by such important Jewish syndicate criminals as Lansky and Doc Stacher, as Hammer put it, "hang" together, even though parts of it were angry, scurrilous, defamatory and selfserving on Luciano's part? The answer comes only after a meticulous search through the crime literature.

A major contradiction between the Luciano testament and
The Valachi Papers
involves the murder of Peter "The Clutching Hand" Morello. While obviously the facts as to "whodunit" are of significance, such contradictions also offer an opportunity for evaluations of sources.

Valachi credits a picturesque gunman he called "Buster from Chicago" as having killed Morello, the top adviser to Joe the Boss Masseria. He knew because Buster told him. (Buster was, according to Valachi, a quaint character who lugged his armaments about in a violin case.) Luciano by contrast says the murder was carried out on his orders by Albert Anastasia and Frank Scalise.

Valachi offered a vivid scene of Buster shooting Morello once, only to have his victim jump up and dance about trying to avoid being hit again. Buster took this as a sporting challenge and backed off, trying to wing Morello as though he was an amusement-park shooting gallery target before he finally polished him off. Obviously, the Buster-Valachi account is "exclusive'' and not subject to confirmation. Yet a diligent researcher might well come across the older tale of the jumping murder victim, one that involved an unsuccessful attempt against Joe the Boss himself and was well documented in news accounts of the time.

It is possible Valachi made up the story, or the ubiquitous Buster appropriated the old Masseria tale and simply pulled the gullible Valachi's leg. But the story must be weighed against Luciano's version. First of all, Joe the Boss, Morello, Luciano, Anastasia and Scalise were allied at the time. According to Luciano, his two assassins had no trouble penetrating the protection around Morello's loan shark headquarters. Buster, according to Valachi, was a hit man for the enemy

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forces of Salvatore Maranzano, and he offers no explanation of how Buster, a rival gunman, simply was able to walk into enemy territory and do his shooting.

Luciano's memoir raises yet another argument, another stumbling block for serious crime scholars· The "Night of the Sicilian Vespers," taken as a standard article of faith for many popular writers, was, according to
The Valachi Papers
, "an intricate painstakingly executed mass execution. ... On the day Maranzano died, some forty Cosa Nostra leaders allied with him were slain across the country, practically all of them Italian-born oldtimers eliminated by a younger generation making its bid for power."

Apparently the publicizing of the supposed purge originated with Richard "Dixie" Davis, a corrupt underworld lawyer who worked for Dutch Schultz. In 1939 he related in
Collier's
magazine details of the Maranzano killing. Davis's source turned out to be Abe "Bo" Weinberg, a top Schultz gunner. According to Weinberg, Maranzano's murder triggered a nationwide attack on the "oldtimers." In fact, "at the same hour ... there was about ninety guineas [Italians] knocked off all over the country. That was the time we Americanized the mobs.'' Yet, in his memoirs, Luciano wonders why no one ever named any of these victims.

Following publication of the Luciano memoirs, a number of studies were made of the Night of the Sicilian Vespers (or what others called "Purge Day"). In
The Business of Crime
(Oxford University Press, 1976), a work funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Kentucky Research Foundation, Humbert S. Nelli reports on a survey made of newspapers issued during September, October and November 1931 in 12 citiesBoston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, New Orleans, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Evidence was found of only one killing concurrent with the Maranzano murder that could even be remotely connected to him. Nelli himself concluded this murder, in Denver, was actually tied to the Colorado bootleg wars of the period. (According to Virgil Peterson, the respected longtime former head of the Chicago Crime Commission, his organization's records showed only two gangland-type killings in the Chicago area during the month of September, and they were not of top-flight underworld figures and "obviously were unrelated to it [Maranzano's murder] in any way.")

Other researchers in the late 1970s supported the Luciano thesis, pointing out the logistical problems facing such "an intricate, painstakingly executed mass execution.'' They estimated each murder would have required at least 10 conspirators: hit men, drivers, backup men, spotters, lookouts and even "shovel men" in case of burials. The idea of 40 or 60 or 90 executions being carried out to precision in such a short time frame is mindboggling, especially when underworld hits frequently take days or weeks to set up.

Clearly, Valachi himself knew nothing about the Night of the Sicilian Vespers, and whatever he may have said merely repeated an old refrain made by Dixie Davis. This hardly dismisses Valachi's revelations as trivial, but makes them, like Luciano's, candidates for scrutiny. Valachi was a low-echelon street soldier, and as Peterson notes in
The Mob
(Greenhill, 1983), "Obviously, his credentials for providing a blueprint of organized crime and its structure throughout America were not overly impressive." In some cases, Peterson further noted, Valachi's Senate subcommittee testimony "was considerably less than forthright."

When other gangster tales are examined, not all of their claims are credible. The revelations made by informer Vincent Teresa in part contradict information from Valachi. Teresa, who served as an aide to New England boss Raymond Patriarca and his underboss Henry Tameleo, certainly had far more knowledge of organized crime than Joe Valachi. As a government informer Teresa gave testimony that resulted in the convictions of scores of mafiosi, and his books,
My Life in the Mafia
and
Vinnie Teresa's Mafia
, written with Thomas Renner, contain mother lodes of information for the crime historian. Confirmability of other facts presents problems.

A federal jury acquitted mob genius Meyer Lansky despite Teresa's testimony against him. Teresa said in
My Life in the Mafia
and later at the trial that he had twice brought money from London gambling junkets, once over $40,000 and the second time over $50,000, and given it to Lansky in Florida. Unfortunately, it turned out that at the time of Teresa's alleged second visit to Lanskyhe described Lansky "fingering through" the moneythe gangster was actually up in Boston recovering from an operation, a fact confirmed by Lansky's wife, a surgeon, and hospital and hotel records.

Problems develop when Teresa's considerable contributions about the mob's gambling activities are subjected to searches for confirmation. The view expressed in gambling literature is one of doubt and even derision. Gambling expert John Scarne found that Teresa knew "little or nothing about crooked casinos."

In discussing the mob's deal with Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, Teresa declares the dictator's cut was "10 percent of all the money betnot just the profits, but the money betand it was to be delivered to him each night by one of his secret policemen." This author failed to find a single gambling authority who gave any credence to such an arrangement. Experts point out that no major gambling casino game offers an edge of

Page xiii

10 percent, and that paying off bribes at 10 percent of the money bet becomes a mathematical impossibility.

Similarly professionals did not take seriously Teresa's account of some of the fixes he said took place at foreign casinos under mob dominance.

Of one on Antigua Teresa stated: "Everything at the casino was in the bag. Card sharks, dice manipulators, all kinds of crooks worked for [mob boss] Charlie the Blade. They had women dealers handling the TwentyOne card games with marked cards; switchmen who moved mercury-loaded dice in and out of the game to control it."

Gambling expert John Scarne pointed out, "Mercury-load dice ... don't work ... and ... casinos all over the world use .750-inch transparent dice." Mercury loads can only be used, if inefficiently, with opaque dice. No high roller, and certainly not a losing one, would play in a casino using anything but transparent dice, which are infinitely harder to fix.

Confirmation becomes crucial when dealing with possible whitewashes of the protagonist in crime "confessions.'' If skepticism should characterize the approach to Luciano's memoirs, it is equally important in evaluating the content of
A Man of Honor
, the autobiography of crime family boss Joe Bonanno, a source relied upon by the federal government in the mid-1980s to make its case in the so-called Commission Trial of a number of New York crime-family bosses. The Bonanno book is remarkable in its omissions. There is, for instance, no acknowledgement of Bonanno's longtime underboss, Carmine Galante.

How reliably can a researcher trust Bonanno's descriptions of machinations within the national commission? Factual confirmation of his narrative of the dethroning of Frank Costello and the assassination of Albert Anastasia is not forthcoming. In Bonanno's account he is the self-proclaimed hero, author of what he termed "Pax Bonanno"which kept underworld peace for more than two years. The Pax began with the attempted assassination of Frank Costello in 1955 at the instigation of Vito Genovese. Enraged by this, Anastasia prepared to have his crime family make war on Genovese. Instead, Bonanno claimed, he himself rushed into the breach, warning Anastasia, "If war breaks out, there'll be no winners. We're all going to lose." gonanno assures his readers he thus brought about peace and "Albert and Vito kissed each other on the cheek."

In August 1956 Bonanno's son, Salvatore (Bill), married Rosalie Profaci, daughter of New York don Joe Profaci. Mob bosses from all around the country attended, including Genovese and Anastasia. Bonanno said he saw to it that they were seated at opposite sides of the hall. "But at least they came. They were making an effort to be nice." He complimented himself on the Pax Bonanno he had established after the attempt on Costello's life.

Pax Bonanno broke down in October 1957 when Anastasia was murdered. Bonanno at the time had been on what he described as a sentimental trip to Italy, and he adds, "In fact, if I had not gone off to Italy I doubt whether anyone would have felt bold enough to make an attempt on Albert's life."

It was a sad ending for Pax Bonanno. But was there any Pax Bonanno at all?

The facts do not confirm Bonanno's statements. The two-year-old Pax Bonanno hangs on the attempt on Costello's life, which is dated as 1955 in Bonanno's book. Actually, the attempt occurred in May 1957. The Anastasia assassination took place a little over five months later. Thus there could have been no Pax Bonanno, no Bonanno handwringing, at the time of the Bonanno-Profaci wedding in 1956.

In fairness to Bonanno and his collaborator, the 1955 date for the Costello murder try pops up regularly in many accounts. After they were so led astray, it is easy to see how Pax Bonanno could represent a sort of historical revisionism.

If
A Man of Honor
, like
The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano
, suffers from some inaccuracies, it does not render the book valueless to the serious student of crime. It is enlightening to discover how important clairvoyance can be within the Mafiathat is, the ability of certain crime bosses to be far away, often thousands of miles, even continents away, whenever a major mob hit occurs.

Inaccuracies, errors, misstatements and whitewashes are par for the course in works on crime, whether the story is told by a criminal or a lawman. The reality the crime historian faces is rather akin to a situation faced by Canada Bill Jones, the celebrated 19th-century gambler and conman who was himself a sucker at losing his money at faro.

Marooned in a small Louisiana river town before the Civil War, he diligently hunted up a faro game at which he proceeded to lose consistently. His partner tried to get him to stop. "The game's crooked," he whispered.

"I know it," Canada Bill replied, "but it's the only one in town."

Mafioso confessions are not the only game in town, but buggings and wiretaps are subject to various interpretations, and stool pigeon accounts tend to reflect what the informer feels investigators want to hear.

The crime historian has to deal with uncertain material, recognize biases, and reach certain conclusions based on the relevancies.

Valid analysis of crime facts is seldom possible in quickie interpretations and with only partial knowl-

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