Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires
Authors: Selwyn Raab
A
LSO BY
S
ELWYN
R
AABMob Lawyer
(with Frank Ragano)Justice in the Back Room
F
IVEF
AMILIES
The Rise, Decline, and
Resurgence of America’s
Mast Powerful Mafia
Empires
Selwyn Raab
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
St. Martin’s Press
New York
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
FIVE FAMILIES. Copyright © 2005 by Selwyn Raab. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
ISBN 0-312-30094-8
EAN 978-0-312-30094-410 9 8 7 6 5 4
For my parents, William and Berdie,
and my grandson, William Raab Goldstein:
May fortune bestow upon him his namesake’s integrity
and zest for life.
E
veryone I know in the New York area has brushed up against the American Mafia at one time or another. Most were unaware of it.Over the greater part of the twentieth century and into the new millennium, the Mafia, aka the Cosa Nostra and the Mob, generated a toxic effect on the lives of all New Yorkers and untold millions of Americans from coast to coast, surreptitiously rifling our pockets and damaging our overall quality of life. Much of the nation unwittingly subsidized in myriad ways the nation’s five most powerful and traditional Cosa Nostra organized-crime gangs, all based in New York, who prefer the warmer title of “families.”
From their New York headquarters, the families collectively created a vast domain, establishing outposts along the East Coast and in plum spots in Florida, California, and elsewhere. One of their sweetest financial coups was pioneering the secret acquisitions of big-time casinos in Las Vegas, converting a drowsy desert town into an international gambling mecca.
Unquestionably, the gangs known as the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese crime families evolved into the reigning giants of the underworld. For decades, they alone possessed the authority and veto power to dominate many of the country’s other Mafia organizations, reducing some to virtual satellites.
New York—the Cosa Nostra’s crown jewel—supported them through indirect
“Mob” taxes on the purchases of clothing and basic foods like vegetables, fruit, fish, and meat. They siphoned handsome illegal profits when drivers filled up at gasoline pumps. They controlled waterfront commerce in the country’s largest port. They preyed on our garbage, inflating the cost of discarding every piece of refuse from homes and work sites. They cashed in on a billion-dollar construction industry, extracting payoffs from major government and private projects, ranging from courthouses to suburban housing tracts, apartment complexes, hospitals, museums, and skyscrapers. They even profited from their arch law-enforcement enemies by squeezing kickbacks from the builders of new FBI offices, police headquarters, and prisons.The human cost of the Mafia’s depredations and plunder is incalculable. Their chieftains were directly responsible for the widespread introduction of heroin into cities of the East and Midwest in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Other less organized criminal groups, witnessing the enormous profits spawned by drug trafficking, followed in their footsteps. But it was the Cosa Nostra’s greed for narcotics dollars that accelerated crime rates, law-enforcement corruption, and the erosion of inner-city neighborhoods in New York and throughout the United States.
My first journalistic collision with the Mafia arose from an unexpected quarter—New York City’s public school system. That introduction, however, reflected the Mob’s insidious influence in so many shadowy areas of big-city existence.
In the early 1960s, my assignment as a new reporter on a major newspaper, the old
New York World-Telegram and The Sun
, was the education beat. I normally wrote about issues like declining reading and mathematics test scores, attempts to unionize teachers, and racial integration disputes—until I was pulled away by a mini scandal concerning shoddy construction and renovations that were endangering the safety of thousands of students and teachers in their classrooms. There was stark evidence of crumbling roofs, walls, floors, electrical fire hazards, and one instance of sewage mixing with drinking water in a high school. All of these violations stemmed from inferior, substandard materials and installations provided for years by a small clique of companies.Digging into the backgrounds of the building-trades companies unearthed an unwholesome pattern: many firms had unlisted or phantom investors who were “connected” to Mob families. Much of the low bidding competition for lucrative school jobs apparently had been rigged by the Mafia to balloon profits through a gimmick called “changed orders.”
School officials responsible for construction and contract oversight were fired or abruptly quit, and negligent contractors were banned from future school work. But not a single mafioso involved in the mess was indicted. The reason: officials retreated, saying there were no clear paper trails incriminating mobsters in money skimming; and no contractor had the courage to testify about the Mob’s role in the scandal. In short, the Mafia endangered thousands of children and escaped unscarred, with its loot untouched.
Later as an investigative newspaper and television reporter, I kept running across the Mafia’s fingerprints on numerous aspects of government, law enforcement, unions, and everyday life.
There were stories of mobsters introducing and overseeing heroin trafficking in Harlem. Without strong police interference, blue-collar neighborhoods were destabilized and turned into drug souks.
There was the ordeal of George Whitmore, a black teenager framed for a triple murder and wrongly imprisoned for years, with the help of rulings by a judge appointed through the support of Mafia bosses.
There was the exposure of perfectly fit mafiosi obtaining “Disabled Driver” permits that allowed them to park almost anywhere in the congested city. Their redundant “friends” at police headquarters authorized the valuable permits.
There was the chronic intimidation of Fulton Fish Market merchants who were compelled to fork over “protection” payments to mobsters to avoid daily harassment of their business operations.
And, there were the uphill struggles of honest painters, carpenters, and teamsters, who were brutally assaulted when they spoke up at union meetings about mobsters taking over their locals and ripping off their welfare and pension funds.
It required little sagacity for a reporter to determine that, by the 1970s, the Mafia operated as a surrogate state in the New York metropolitan area, brazenly dominating vital businesses and imposing its farrago of invisible surcharges on everyone. In fact, the Mob’s economic surge in the second half of the century was astonishing. A government analysis estimated that, in the 1960s, the illicit profit of the nation’s twenty-odd Mafia families topped $7 billion annually, approximately the combined earnings of the ten largest industrial corporations in the country. The lion’s share of the illicit wealth was reaped by the most powerful segment of the Cosa Nostra conglomerate—the five New York gangs.
For much of the twentieth century New York’s municipal and law-enforcement authorities seemed indifferent to these criminal inroads. Questioned in the 1970s about the Mafia’s sway, officials privately conceded that
previous attempts to dislodge them had been largely futile and there was no public outcry for similar meaningless crackdowns. Then, too, the authorities felt that the public largely tolerated mafiosi as unthreatening to the general population, viewing them as a loosely organized group engaged largely in nonviolent crimes like bookmaking and operating popular neighborhood gambling dens.The apologists contended that strict regulatory enforcement of the wholesale food, construction, and garbage-carting industries might produce severe economic headaches. City Hall and many law-enforcement agencies tacitly subscribed to a laissez-faire accommodation with the Mob. Almost everyone in power was content so long as food supplies reached restaurants and supermarkets, construction projects were completed, and refuse was picked up on schedule. A consensus decreed that so long as there were no incessant complaints, there was no reason to stir up trouble about mobster involvement in producing basic necessities.
Far too long, the majority of media editors were of a similar mind with officialdom. They preferred reporting on the occasional sensational homicides or internecine Mob wars in place of costly long-range inquiries to document Cosa Nostra’s economic clout and its manipulation of municipal agencies. A sizable part of the media preferred glamorizing mobsters as an integral and colorful segment of New York’s chaotic texture. Despite their criminal records and suspected participation in multiple murders, John Gotti, Joey Gallo, and Joe Colombo were accorded celebrity status and often portrayed not as merciless killers but as maverick, antiestablishment folk heroes.
Indeed, a commonly recycled story by newspapers and television subtly praised the Mafia, citing its formidable presence for low street-crime rates in predominantly Italian-American sections. With predatory crime soaring, two Mafia strongholds, Manhattan’s Little Italy and Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst, were presented as safe havens to live in. Unreported and underemphasized were the factors behind these statistics. Significantly, the gangsters relied on sympathetic neighborhood residents to alert them to the presence of probing law-enforcement agents and suspicious outsiders trying to encroach on their bastions. These watchdogs helped turn their neighborhoods into xenophobic enclaves, sometimes resulting in violence against strangers, especially African-Americans and Hispanics.
The legend about security in Mafia-tainted neighborhoods still prevails in the new century. A friend in the suburbs expressed his relief about his daughter’s move to New York because she had found an apartment in a safe part of the city—Little Italy—protected by local “Mob guys.”
The world of organized crime is totally unlike any other journalistic beat, Accurate, documented data about the Mafia’s clandestine activities usually is difficult to verify. The five families never issue annual financial reports, nor do their bosses happily consent to incisive personality profiles. Over more than four decades, I compiled information piecemeal, combing through a variety of public and confidential records, court transcripts, real estate transactions, and files from federal and state law-enforcement agencies obtained through Freedom of Information laws.
There were also interviews with scores of active and former investigators, highlighted by the late Ralph Salerno, whose encyclopedic knowledge and documentation of the American Mafia remains unchallenged.
Then, too, there were the grim details of beleaguered workers resisting Mafia musclemen in control of their unions. Facts about labor rackets were gleaned with the aid of Herman Benson and James F McNamara, two lifelong advocates of union reform, who could locate witnesses to mobster takeovers of their locals. Benson is a founder of the Association for Union Democracy, the principal national civic organization that aids activists battling corruption and organized-crime infiltration in the labor movement. McNamara, a former union organizer, became an expert consultant on labor racketeering for several law-enforcement agencies.
Persuading admitted mafiosi and their helpmates to talk candidly is never easy. I was fortunate in getting several to unravel the Mafia’s mysterious codes and culture and to elucidate the art of surviving in a volatile criminal environment.
One breakthrough in learning about contemporary Cosa Nostra lore and traditions came about obliquely in the early 1980s from a
New York Times
style rule. A mobster named Pellegrino Masselli was a central figure in a high-profile case about alleged Mafia profiteering from a New York City subway project and a mysterious murder. Most of the press delighted in referring to him by his underworld sobriquet, “Butcher Boy.” Because the
Times
prohibits the use of pejorative nicknames, my stories always referred to the gangster with an honorific: “Mr. Masselli.” Obviously unaware of newspaper etiquette, Masselli, out of the blue, telephoned a compliment for exhibiting proper “respect” to him in print. He also volunteered to be interviewed in his prison cell about the subway deal and the gangland slaying of his son.That encounter initiated a relationship that lasted until Masselli’s death—from natural causes. Over five years, with the proviso that he would never be identified in new stories, Masselli offered tips on Mafia-related developments and enlightenment on ingrained Cosa Nostra customs. He was particularly revealing about the
pathological mind-set of his fellow mobsters and how they judged one another’s conduct. Committing murder might be a horrific act for a normal person, but Masselli explained that a committed mafioso is unperturbed by violence. Moreover, he is applauded by his bosses and colleagues as long as “the piece of work is done professionally and competently,” even if a “hit” requires killing a good friend.A lengthy on-the-record interview with another admitted mafioso, Anthony Accetturo, provided unique insight into a veteran Cosa Nostra’s experiences and thinking. A longtime “capo,” the head of a crew or unit in New Jersey, Accetturo, after being imprisoned for racketeering, agreed to be questioned and to reminisce freely about his Mob career and his dealings with important mafiosi.
Compelling information about the Mafia’s white-collar activities on Wall Street and other financial crimes came from a Cosa Nostra “associate,” or helper. Proclaiming himself “rehabilitated,” he described various schemes inaugurated to fleece investors when the Mafia capitalized on the 1990s stock market mania. His explanation for coming clean was a desire to appease his conscience and to prevent future suckers from being snared in organized-crime financial traps. Whatever his reasons, the information proved to be accurate. To protect him from retaliation, his identity must remain undisclosed.
