The Mafia Encyclopedia (113 page)

Read The Mafia Encyclopedia Online

Authors: Carl Sifakis

Tags: #True Crime, #Organized Crime, #test

BOOK: The Mafia Encyclopedia
5.61Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Page 333
Not even his own gangsters liked or respected Schultz. but they did fear him. His payroll for torpedoes and the like was probably the lowest in the city, and he flew into a rage whenever a gunman asked him for a raise. Only Abbadabba got really big bucks, $10,000 a week. Berman had to threaten to take his mathematical skills to other mobsters unless he got the money. If he had left, Schultz doubtlessly would have exterminated him, but that would hardly have solved the problem of a huge drop in income, so the Dutchman turned magnanimous and paid him.
Mobsters looked down on Schultz. A dapper dan Schultz was not. Luciano once told an interviewer in disdain, "The guy had a couple of million bucks and he dressed like a pig." Schultz himself told an interviewer, "I think only queers wear silk shirts. I never bought one in my life. A guy's a sucker to spend fifteen or twenty dollars on a shirt. Hell, a guy can get a good one for two bucks!"
Luciano also said of Schultz: "... he worried about spending two cents for a newspaper. That was his big spending, buying the papers so's he could read about himself."
Schultz actually was an avid newspaper reader. He allowed he had taken the name of Dutch Schultz because "it was short enough to fit in the headlines. If I'd kept the name of Flegenheimer, nobody would have heard of me." Schultz could as well go bananas over what was written about him. He once verbally laced into
New York Times
crime reporter Meyer Berger because he had described him in a story as a "pushover for a blonde."
"What kind of language," the gangster raged, "is that to use in the
New York Times?
"
Actually, Schultz wasn't all that offended. There was only one way to do that. His notorious "mouthpiece," Dixie Davis, later said of him: "You can insult Arthur's girl, spit in his face, push him aroundand he'll laugh. But don't steal a dollar from his accounts. If you do, you're dead."
Among those who are most popularly thought to have done so (and died for it) was the homicidal Legs Diamond. Having survived several murder attempts by Schultz and other mobsters, he became known as the clay pigeon of the underworld. When he was finally put to sleep permanently, in a bed in an upstate hotel room, Schultz commented: "Just another punk caught with his hands in my pockets."
Schultz fought a no-quarters war with Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, a former underling who sought to feed his ambitions by taking over part of Schultz's empire. On February 8, 1932, Coil found himself trapped in a telephone booth by men generally held to have been Schultz machine gunners.
Dutch Schultz lingered two days after being shot
in a Newark, New Jersey, chop house; the death
sentense is believed to have been carried out to keep
the underworld leader from having prosecutor
Tom Dewey assassinated.
Wiping out Coll gave Schultz an added measure of prestige in the syndicate, and no one else gave serious thought to knocking him off, although certainly Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky wanted to take over his beer and policy rackets. In addition, they knew Schultz was too erratic and sooner or later would jeopardize them all. But Uncle Sam seemed to come to the rescue by indicting Schultz for income tax evasion.
While Schultz was out of circulation awaiting trial, the other syndicate members moved to take over his rackets, with Lansky and Longy Zwillman in New Jersey getting cooperation from Schultz's right-hand man, Bo Weinberg. Then in a shattering development, Schultz beat the rap and came back to claim his empire. All the syndicate men could do was claim they were minding the store. Schultz squinted at them, indicating that sooner or later he'd settle that score, but his immediate attention fell on Bo Weinberg, who he suspected as being the traitor within his ranks. Weinberg disappeared. One story holds that Schultz killed him with his bare hands, another that he put a bullet in his head, and still a third that he had Bo fitted with a "cement overcoat" and heaved into the Hudson River while still alive. Schultz was capable of any of the above.
There is an excellent chance that war would have broken out shortly between Schultz and Luciano, Lansky, Zwillman and others, but again the law interfered, this time in the form of special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who in his war on vice and racketeering had turned his main focus on Schultz in 1935. All around,
Page 334
Schultz saw his operations stunted and his revenues decreased. He knew only one answer to that: Kill Dewey. Schultz went to the national board of the syndicate with his demand that Dewey be assassinated. The mobsters were all shocked except for the kill-crazy Albert Anastasia who saw merit in Schultz's idea, totally unmindful of the heat to be generated in the murder of a prosecutor. Even Anastasia backed off when he realized the implications. Schultz's request was dismissed.
He stormed out of the meeting, warning defiantly: ''I still say he ought to be hit. And if nobody else is gonna do it, I'm gonna hit him myself.''
His attitude sealed his fate. The boys voted a quick contract on him, with Anastasia backing the idea.
On October 23, 1935, Schultz, Abbadabba Berman and two enforcers, Lulu Rosenkrantz and Abe Landau, were having a business meeting and meal at one of Schultz's favorite hangouts, the Palace Chop House and Tavern in Newark, New Jersey. Schultz got up from the table and went to the men's room. While he was there, two gunmen entered the Palace. Their technique was picture perfect. One of them checked the men's room on the way in, and seeing a man at a urinal, shot him. This was to prevent the killers from later being surprised from behind. Then they shot the three Schultz men at the table.
It was then that the hit men discovered that Schultz was not at the table. Remembering the man in the john, they found it was Schultz. The gunman who had done all the shooting, Charles "the Bug" Workman, paused long enough to clean out the money from Schultz's pockets and fled. Amazingly Schultz was able to stagger to a table where he fell unconscious.
Schultz lived a couple more days in the hospital but did not name his killers, instead talking mostly gibberish with considerable mysterious mumblings about all the money he had hidden.
Eventually Workman was convicted in the Schultz rubout and did 23 years in prison. He never said who had ordered the Dutchman killed. The Bug probably didn't even know such details.
Schuster, Arnold: See Tenuto, Frederick J.
Scotto, Anthony M. (1934 ): Longshoremen's union leader
He was for a time hailed a "new breed labor leader," one who could bring respectability and honesty to the New York waterfront. Anthony M. Scotto came to the fore in New York longshoremen's union affairs after the death in 1963 of Anthony "Tough Tony" Anastasio, to whom he was related by marriage. His father-in-law, also named Anthony Anastasio, was Tough Tony's nephew.
Scotto moved in high-echelon political and business circles. But, in 1979, federal investigators found that labor racketeering was still the order of the day on the waterfront. Scotto was then general organizer of the AFL-CIO International Longshoremen's Association and president of the union's Local 1814 in Brooklyn, Tough Tony's old fiefdom and one of the top three posts in the 100,000-member union, representing workers from Maine to Texas. Scotto was arrested.
Scotto's father-in-law was tried along with him, and both were convicted despite such character witnesses for Scotto as New York governor Hugh L. Carey, (who called him trustworthy, energetic, intelligent, effective and dedicated) and two former New York mayors, Robert Wagner and John V. Lindsay. Scotto was convicted of taking more than $200,000 in cash payoffs from waterfront businesses despite his claim that he had "never taken a cent" for himself from anyone. He did allow he had accepted a number of "political contributions,'' not payoffs, totaling $75,000, which he claimed he gave to New York lieutenant governor Marlo M. Cuomo in his unsuccessful bid for the mayoralty in 1977 and to Carey for his successful 1978 reelection try.
Scotto could have been sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, but U.S. District Judge Charles E. Stewart Jr. gave him only five years and fined him $75,000, explaining he had been "extremely impressed" by letters from numerous business, labor and political leaders pleading for leniency.
See also:
Plants
.
Seven Group: Predecessor of the national crime syndicate
The bloodletting that accompanied the onset of Prohibition has never been accurately measured, but it was inevitable when suddenly the prospect of enormous profit was dangled before basically not-too-well-to-do criminals.
With the end of World War I, there weren't all that many opportunities available for organized criminals. The political bosses did use them to control elections, but unfortunately elections did not come around every month. In the old days the political bosses accepted the responsibility of seeing after their criminal cohorts in "slow periods," putting them to work as bouncers, as shills for gambling joints and whorehouses, and so on. However, this too was changing as reformersblue-bloods, businessmen, the middle class, leaders of various ethnic groupswere demanding a cleanup. In more and more parts of the country political leaders could not operate in such blatant style any more. They had no
Page 335
more use for the criminals and no reason to support them.
The Volstead Act of 1919 dramatically altered everything. For criminals, there was a new opportunity for making millions. Gangsters slaughtered old buddies to take over bootlegging rackets, and explosions of gunshots and bombs filled the air of almost every American community of almost every size.
Yet with exceptions here and there, by the late 1920s peace had settled on the bootleg world. It came through the Seven Group.
Forward-thinking gangsters had decided all the warfare was interfering with making money. There had to be peace in obtaining liquor and there had to be an end to gangs hijacking each other's supplies. The answer lay in some sort of organization that could constitute a central liquor buying office to handle all orders for booze and give everyone a fair share. This system would reduce the deadly competition for supplies and the inordinate protection costs for shipments. This would leave the individual bootleg gangs with more than ample time and resources to take care of any freelance hijackers who might be foolish enough to continue to carry out raids.
Who deserves credit for originating the idea is difficult to tell, but it was probably either Arnold Rothstein, often called the Brain, or Johnny Torrio, also called the Brain. Certainly both of themand Meyer Lansky and Lucky Lucianowere all boosting the idea by 1927.
The organization known as the Seven Group, since it was originally comprised of seven separate power groups, included Luciano and Frank Costello from Manhattan; Joe Adonis from Brooklyn and parts of Manhattan; Longy Zwillman from New Jersey and Long Island, New York; Waxey Gordon and the rising Nig Rosen from Philadelphia; Nucky Johnson from Atlantic City; Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, the protection "enforcers"; and Torrio who came out of his Brooklyn retirement to offer organizational advice.
When peace suddenly broke out in the mid-Atlantic area as the Seven Group established its authority, other gangs around the country clamored to join, among them those bossed by Moe Dalitz in Cleveland, King Solomon in Boston and Danny Walsh in Providence. Even Al Capone was attracted but the Chicago gang wars had gone on too long to be simply switched off by an appeal to reason. By the end of 1928 there were at least 22 gangs in the Seven Group.
By that time Rothstein had been murdered, apparently not because of a gangland plot against him, but over a huge gambling debt that he had welshed on to professional gamblers. That did not stop the momentum of the Seven Group and it led to the next logical step in the solidifying nationwide criminal linkmafioso, Italian, Jewish, Irish, Polish or whatever.
In 1929 the underworld held a vital conference at Atlantic City where plans for new criminal enterprises and cooperation after the end of Prohibition were discussed. Had it not been for the success of the Seven Group such a conference would not have been held and the confederation of the gangs around the country might never have come to fruition nor created the national crime syndicate.
See also:
Atlantic City Conference
.
Sex and the Mafia
A sort of mystique has built up around the members of the Mafia and organized crime on the matter of sexlicit or illicit. Mafiosi have three advantages most men do not enjoy: 1) they have considerable money to lure women with; 2) if married, their work keeps them out to all hours of the night or even away from home for days at a time, with alibis; 3) they rarely need alibis anyway since their wives are expected to ask no questions.
Much of the conversations picked up by police wiretaps concern sexual matters. Mafiosi are accomplished sexual gossips. Longy Zwillman may well have been properly labeled by the press as "the Al Capone of New Jersey," but whatever his accomplishments in organized crime, and they were many, he was regarded as quite the stud. His romance with budding actress Jean Harlow made him much celebrated within the mob and it was said the high point of a gathering of the boys would come when Longy fished out of his wallet what he claimed was a lock of Harlow's pubic hair.
Although there are rules in the Honored Society that prevent a mafioso from violating another member's wife, the imposition of the death penalty for sexual offenses is rather unheard of. The real purpose of the rule on sexual behavior is to cut down on "matters of honor" that could inhibit the orderly activities of the crime family.
Still, sexual charges are sometimes brought. One involved a highly ranked member of the Gambino family, Carmine Lombardozzi, who was brought up on charges by a lower-ranking member, Sabato Muro. Lombardozzi was ordered to put things right after he became involved with Muro's daughter. Carmine did what was required of him by divorcing his wife of 27 years and marrying the younger woman.
Prudery within Mafia circles is common when it applies to the female members of a mafioso's family. Walter Stevens, one of the most dependable hit men employed by Johnny Torrio and Al Capone, was a terror on the matter of sex. He censored his children's reading material, ripping out pages of books that he considered immoral. His daughters were not allowed to wear short skirts or use lipstick or rouge, and he screened what movies they could attend. In fact, Torrio

Other books

High Maintenance by Jamie Hill
Sharon Schulze by To Tame a Warrior's Heart
The Warlock Rock by Christopher Stasheff
More Perfect than the Moon by Patricia MacLachlan
Beautiful One by Mary Cope
Deception by Gina Watson
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller