The Mafia Encyclopedia (128 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 380
discharged, he retired from Chicago crime and turned the whole operation over to Capone.
Weiss's attempts to rub out Capone continued. Perhaps the most famous occurred in Cicero on September 20, 1926, when a fleet of automobiles filled with his gangsters drove past the Hawthorne Inn and ventilated the building with 1,000 bullets and slugs from shotguns, handguns and machine guns. A Capone bodyguard and a woman bystander were shot, but again Capone was not hit.
Three weeks later, on October 11, 1926, Weiss bought it himself. Capone assassins machine-gunned him to death as he crossed the street to his headquarters above O'Banion's old flower shop. A bodyguard, Paddy Murphy, was killed in the same blaze of bullets, and three others with them were wounded. The shooting came from a second-floor room across the street, a room rented the day following the Cicero raid.
Weiss, aged 28, left an estate believed to be worth well in excess of $1.3 million. His widow seems to have been most upset by the fact that there were only 18 carloads of flowers for Hymie's funeral while earlier funerals for O'Banion and Nails Morton of the North Siders had rated 26 and 20 loads each. Bugs Moran patiently explained to the widow that since the murder of O'Banion, 30 other members of the gang had fallen, mostly to Capone guns. This had considerably reduced the number of available flower donors.
Westies: New York Irish mob allied with the Mafia
An argument could be made on both sides whether the most kill-crazy mobsters in New York in recent years were the brutal hit men of the Gambinos under Roy DeMeo, who maintained what can only be called a slaughterhouse flat in Brooklyn, or the Westies, who terrorized Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood and the surrounding West Side (the original setting for
West Side Story
).
Those aficionados who favored the Westies (many of whom were former choirboys) could cite as an example the fate of one of the gang's own members, Patrick "Paddy" Dugan. From the Westies viewpoint Dugan's transgressions were many and clearly called for the death penalty. Dugan was in the habit of making money on the side by shaking down loan sharks, even after the Westies had decided to align themselves with the Gambinos and cease such unseemly behavior. Dugan was warned many times to stop all non-sanctioned operations but simply did not obey. Then Dugan murdered one of Westies leader Jimmy Coonan's close buddies and his fate was sealed.
Dugan was murdered, and in typical Westies style his body was sliced up into little pieces for disposal. Coonan retained the severed fingers, which he added to a bag full of the fingers of other victims. Coonan showed the bag to others to encourage them to be more cooperative.
This hardly meant the Westies were not a sentimental bunch. They decided Dugan still was a reasonably good lad, so they took his severed head to a local ginmill, propped it up on the bar and for several hours Coonan, other Westies and friends of Dugan sentimentally toasted the deceased's memory. They even lit a cigarette of Dugan's brand and placed it between the dead man's lips.
The Westies never comprised more than a couple dozen men, but they were so kill-crazy their foes must have thought they were up against a Roman legion. The mob became a fearsome operative in narcotics, extortion, loan-sharking, labor racketeering and kidnapping. The Westies kidnapped several Mafia men for ransom and in some cases even after collecting the money consigned their victim to the depths of the Hudson River. The mafiosi knew that if they tried to invade Westie turf they faced certain death.
Then Coonan pulled his greatest coup, murdering a big-money mob loan shark named Ruby Stein. Coonan had a special motive in disposing of Ruby since he was in to the loan shark for $70,000, and other Westies were in for similar sums. More important the Westies came into the possession of Ruby's "black book," which recorded the millions of Mafia dollars that were out in loans. The Westies simply went out and took over many of the loans.
After the death of Carlo Gambino, his successor Paul Castellano decided he had to tame the Westies, but he feared killing them, realizing the gang was monstrous about retribution. Instead, he took them into the Gambino family fold, using them in a number of rackets and for a number of hits. The matter of the Stein murder and his missing book was ignored, the mob taking an estimated $4 million hit, as the Westies swore they knew nothing about the matter. By the early 1980s many of the Westies were very rich; Coonan himself was worth millions.
Together with the Gambinos, the gang operated many juicy rackets. They infiltrated the union representing personnel working on the U.S.S.
Intrepid
, the aircraft carrier museum anchored in the Hudson River. That gallant ship had survived kamikaze attacks in World War II but was almost sunk into bankruptcy by the skimming of ticket receipts and the padding of payroll with no-show jobs. The Westies also dominated certain backstage unions at Broadway theaters and were said to be a partial cause of rising ticket prices.
Despite the wealth heaped on the gang, the fact remained once a Westie always a Westie. Some of them
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continued unauthorized stealing from other mobsters as well as from their own associates. Many were constantly drugged up and followed an old custom of playing Russian roulette for $1,000 a bullet.
Disaffection spread in the ranks, some of the boys faulting Coonan for ''trying to be more Italian than Irish.' Coonan himself left for the comforts of New Jersey and only came to the West Side when absolutely necessary. Several Westies determined it was time to kill Coonan, but their plans never worked out. To relieve some of the pressure on himself, Coonan with some other Westies framed the gang's number two man, Mickey Featherstone, for murder. Featherstone was convicted and then decided to turn informer, something that shocked the denizens of Hell's Kitchen because Mickey had been regarded as the most stand-up guy in the mob.
Featherstone's evidence landed a number of Westies in prison on RICO (Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act) charges. Jimmy Coonan got 75 years. Some others got 40-or 50-year terms. The Westies were decimated, while Featherstone and a few others went into the witness protection program, and the alliance between the Irish and Italian gangsters was finished.
Some said the Westies destroyed themselves or that law enforcement did them in. Others however noted yet another irresistible force. Gentrification drove many of the working-class elements out of the neighborhood. They had been the primary victims of the Westies, and without the main victims, the ravagers were likewise ravaged.
(It might be noted that even with the Westies hold on the Broadway unions broken, no one noticed any reduction in theater ticket prices.)
See also:
Coonan, Jimmy
.
West Suburban Citizens' Association: See Vigilantism and the Mafia.
Whack: Term for murder
Originally
whack
was the criminals' word for beating up or injuring a victim, but in the Mafia lexicon it now means murder. The term continues to be used by the mob on the theory that the courts will not accept its mention as indicating a killing. That has turned out to be a vain hope as prosecutors have been able to prove to jurors that when the whackees mentioned in mob conversations end up dead, it is obvious that the word has no "benign" meaning.
Thus it has become more common for mobsters to use such phrases as "break an egg" to replace whacking. Jurors seem to be amused by the new vocabularybut still convict.
Whalen, Grover A. (18861962): New York police commissioner
One of the most ineffective police commissioners in New York City's history, to take a most charitable view, was Grover Whalen, remembered today as "the Official Greeter of New York City" and originator of the city's celebrated ticker-tape parades. In fact, Whalen presided over the most corrupt years of the police department since before the Great War.
From the very first day in his police post, Whalen started acting in the mob's best interest. In later years, neither Lucky Luciano nor Frank Costello made much of a secret that Whalen had always been in their hip pocket. In fact, $20,000 a week was said to have been delivered in a trusty, plain paper bag to the commissioner's office at police headquarters. The charge was never proven, but the amount does seem in line with any measure of compensation for value received.
In 1928, Whalen, general manager of New York's John Wanamaker department store, was tapped by the corrupt Jimmy Walker as police commissioner. Whalen was reluctant at first to accept, but John Wanamaker officials, urged by the mayor, promised Whalen that if he took the post, his $100,000-a-year salary from the store would continue as a supplement to his city pay.
Within six hours of taking office, Whalen started serving the underworld. First, he abolished the police confidential squad, which unearthed police corruption and political malfeasance. Next, he busted its commander, Lewis J. Valentine, back to his civil-service rank of lieutenant and transferred him to the wilds of Long Island City. It had long been the habit of police watchers to gauge a New York police administration's honesty and devotion to duty by how it treated Valentine, a rigidly honest cop who attacked the mobs and crooked police with equal fervor.
Commissioner Whalen had made it clear which way he was taking the department that first day. During the ensuing period the mob operated with more impunity than at any other time until the reign of William O'Dwyer after World War II.
Whalen's administration represented, for instance, the heyday of the slot machine racket with special "police stickers." Under the aegis of Costello, the mob set up slot machines all over the city (some with special stools so that little schoolchildren could get high enough to feed in coins), all with colored stickers that informed the local police that the machine was a legitimate graft payer. If a machine failed to have a sticker, it was subject to police seizure, and the sticker colors were changed frequently to prevent freelance operators from counterfeiting them. A police officer who made the mistake of interfering with a mob machine could expect to be transferred to the outer edges of the city, inevitably
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far away from his home. The system was extremely well known to policemen in the city as well as to every journalist, and there was no way it could continue without an okay from the commissioner's office.
With Whalen's record of doing right with the mob there is little reason to doubt the story of Costello, who handled police payoffs for the syndicate, informing Luciano once: "Yesterday, around noon, Whalen called me. He was desperate for thirty grand to cover his margin [on the stock market]. What could I do? I hadda give it to him. We own him."
Whalen's administration permitted the Luciano-Lansky-Costello combination to accumulate the money and power needed to wipe out the old-line mafiosi and create a modern underworld of organized crime. During his tenure, Whalen diverted public attention away from serious crime by organizing traffic campaigns, encouraging anti-communist demonstrations, and providing showmanshipwith the omnipresent gardenia in his lapelas chairman of the mayor's reception committee for distinguished visitors.
See also:
Bagman
.
White Hand Gang: Irish waterfront gangsters
Around 1900, the various powerful Irish gangs on the Brooklyn waterfront combined into the White Hand Gang, so named because they said they were battling the "Black Hand dagoes." Indeed, from about 1900 to 1925, a grim war was waged along the New York waterfront between Irish and Italian gangsters for control of the lush rackets there. Slowly the Italian mafiosi gained, but at a tremendous loss of blood and manpower.
After World War I, the White Handers retained a firm grip on the Brooklyn Bridge-Red Hook sections and collected tribute from barge and wharf owners. Those who declined to pay saw their wharves and vessels looted, burned or wrecked. All longshoremen had to pay a daily commission for the right to work. Some paid willingly because they were Irish and saw their salvation in the vows of the White Handers to keep the docks clear of Italians.
Following the pattern of the Irish-American gangsters of the 19th century, the White Handers were a violent lot and could be counted on to kill one of their own if there was a quick profit in so doing. It was never determined who murdered White Hand leader Dinny Meehan shortly after the war, but the power thereafter passed, after some obligatory bloodletting, to Wild Bill Lovett, a pinched-faced little man who looked too weak to harm a fly. He could, however, shoot a lot of people. Wild Bill was considered the greatest worthy ever to head the White Handers, and he actually had the Mafia-Camorra elements on the run as he extended White Hand influence.
Lovett was assassinated in 1923 by a mafioso murder expert nicknamed Dui Cuteddi (Two Knives), using no such namesake weapons, but rather a cleaver. Dui Cuteddi was shipped back to Sicily with a handsome pension for his fine services, and the Mafia elements came on strong under a triumvirate of Vince Mangano, Albert Anastasia and Joey Adonis. Adonis was heavily involved in bootlegging at the time, partners with the likes of Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello, but Prohibition, it was realized, was a short-term situation, while the waterfront rackets were forever.
The White Hand power passed to Richard "Peg Leg" Lonergan, a zany killer who had lost a leg in an argument with a train during a railway looting expedition. He was a pock-faced killer, with, according to the police, at least 20 murders to his credit. He would maim any Mafia terrorists trying to move in on his docks. Then he would turn around and demand double tribute from the hapless victim who had the effrontery ever to pay off Italians.
However, if the Mafia had been cunning enough to murder a crafty opponent like Wild Bill Lovett, a mad hatter like Lonergan could not survive for long. On the day of Christmas 1925, Lonergan led a contingent of his men into the Adonis Social Club, a South Brooklyn speakeasy owned by the Mafia. Although the Irish hoodlums were greatly outnumbered, Lonergan was contemptuous of the foe, including a rather fat-faced one with a long scar on his face. Seeing two Irish girls dancing with Italian gangsters, Lonergan kicked them out of the place, ordering them to "get back with the white men."
Suddenly all the lights went out and guns blazed in the darkness. When vision was restored, Lonergan and his top aides, Needles Ferry and Aaron Harms, lay dead in a pool of blood. The rest of the White Handers had fled.
Eventually the police investigation identified the man with the scar as none other than Al Capone, then back from Chicago for a sentimental visit to his old home ground. The police could not substantiate reports that Capone had personally plugged Lonergan and had to drop any prosecution of him. Capone himself insisted he had had nothing to do with the killings, declaring, "I never met an Irishman I didn't like." On his return to Chicago, Capone continued his extermination campaign against the Irish O'Banion Gang.
The New York mafiosi were grateful for Capone's caper in Brooklyn, and it was said that if Capone hadn't triggered the violence, Lonergan and his cohorts might have walked out safely. As it was, the White Handers had been stripped of their last important leader. The

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