The Mafia Encyclopedia (16 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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This trial came about after a right-wing, crusading newspaper columnist, Westbrook Pegler, started digging into Bioff's activities. Pegler discovered Bioff as the "guest of honor" at a lavish Hollywood party and remembered him as a venal little panderer during his own apprentice reporter days in Chicago. When Pegler started attacking Bioff in print, the latter tried to counter by attacking Pegler's anti-unionism. It didn't wash. Pegler pointed out Bioff had served jail sentences for brutalizing his prostitutes but had in one case not served a six-month sentence, not an unusual situation in a corrupt Chicago law enforcement system. Ultimately, Bioff was forced to do that time, but did it in true crime syndicate stylewith a private office in the Chicago House of Correction and a tub of iced beer daily.
Pegler's newspaper assaults finally got Bioff and Browne convicted in 1941 for violation of anti-
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racketeering laws, and each was sentenced to 10 years. Both men broke under that pressure and agreed to testify against many top leaders of the Chicago Syndicate, among them Frank Nitti, Paul Ricca, Phil D'Andrea, Charlie Gioe, Lou Kaufman and Johnny Roselli.
The defense constantly attacked Bioff's character and his lying testimony before several grand juries. Bioff shook his head when asked to explain himself and said, "I am just a low, uncouth person. I'm a low-type sort of man."
Bioff and Browne's testimony convicted the Chicago crime leaders who went to prison. Nitti was an exception. Fearful of having to do time, the supposed tough successor to Al Capone committed suicide. As the syndicate gangsters entered prison, Bioff and Browne went out. They ran for their lives.
No one ever learned where Browne went. It turned out Bioff had gone to Phoenix, Arizona, after a time, living under the name of William Nelson.
Bioff had tasted power in his Hollywood days, and it was not an appetite he could give up readily. In 1952 Bioff and wife contributed $5,000 to the senatorial campaign of a department store heir named Barry Goldwater. After the election a warm friendship blossomed between the Arizona senator and Bioff-Nelson. In the meantime Bioff also went to work for Gus Greenbaum who was running the Riviera in Las Vegas. It was an unhappy coincidence, since the Riviera was secretly backed by the Chicago Outfit, and the very gangsters that Bioff had sent to prison. It was only a matter of time until the boys in Chicago learned who Willie Nelson was. In October 1955, Goldwater, an accomplished air force pilot, ferried Bioff and his wife to Las Vegas and back to Phoenix in his private plane. On November 4, 1955, Bioff left his house, climbed into his small pickup truck, and waved to his wife who was looking out the kitchen door. When Bioff stepped on the starter, there was a terrific explosion. Pieces of the truck flew in every direction. A little late perhaps, but Chicago had avenged Bioff's betrayal.
A few years later Gus Greenbaum and his wife were murdered in very brutal fashion. Yes, Greenbaum was stealing the mob's casino money, but it was also true that the boys had never really forgiven him for giving the hated Bioff a haven.
See also:
Movie Racketeering
.
Black Book: Las Vegas Mafia blacklist
Though heralded as a major weapon against the Mafia, one that would make Las Vegas safe from organized crime, it was largely an exercise in futility.
In 1960 the Nevada Gaming Control Board issued a "Black Book" to all casino licensees. It contained just 11 sheets of letter-sized paper, each sheet bearing a man's photograph and a list of aliases. All with an arrest record, these 11 men were mostly considered to be part of organized crime:
John Louis Battaglia, Los Angeles
Marshal[l] Caifano, Chicago
Carl James Civella, Kansas City
Nichola Civella, Kansas City
Trigger Mike Coppola, Miami
Louis Tom Dragna, Los Angeles
Robert L. "Bobby" Garcia, Southern California
Sam Giancana, Chicago
Motel Grezebrenacy, Kansas City
Murray Llewellyn Humphreys, Chicago
Joe Sica, Los Angeles
The idea was to purge the town of its Mafia and organized crime flavor. The men named were not to be allowed on the premises of the casinos and the casinos were held responsible for keeping them out. An interesting idea, especially since some on the list were probably owners through "front men" of a piece of some of the casinos. The blacklist theoretically would keep casino owners off their own premises.
One of the men, Caifano, also known as Johnny Marshall, challenged the principle of the Black Book in court, claiming among other things that his constitutional rights had been violated, that he had been listed as an "undesirable" without notice or hearing. Caifano, a member of the Chicago Outfit, eventually lost his case, the federal court adding further insult by requiring him to pay court costs. The court held that "the problem of excluding hoodlums from gambling places in the state of Nevada can well be regarded by the state authorities as a matter almost of life or death."
The listing of Chicago mob head Sam Giancana as an undesirable put much pressure on singer Frank Sinatra, who, in the words of the Nevada Gaming Commission, "has for a number of years maintained and continued social association with Sam Giancana well knowing his unsavory and notorious reputation, and has openly stated that he intends to continue such association in defiance...." At first Sinatra made noises that he intended to fight the Black Book but in the end announced he was "withdrawing from the gaming industry in Nevada."
Since then the Black Book has been continued. Its name was changed in 1976 to "The List of Excluded Persons," following a complaint from a black citizen that the original title was a racial slur. However, it has never amounted to much and certainly never made a dent in organized crime's penetration of the casino scene in Nevada. A somewhat harsher judgment is offered by
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Jerome H. Skolnick, professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, in House of Cards, a study of casino gambling: ''It was more a public-relations stunt than a serious control measure. In any event, its existence did nothing to reassure the federal authorities and others that Nevada had succeeded in expelling organized criminal interests from its casinos.''
Black Hand: Italian extortion racket
What the newspapers called "the Black Hand Society" never really existed in Americaor anywhere else. That's cold comfort to the hundreds who number among their victims, forming a bloody trail that makes it easy to understand why there have been and still are today politicians and investigators who speak of the Black Hand as being synonymous with the Mafia or "Cosa Nostra."
The Black Hand racket was extortion, a pay-or-die shakedown of the Italian community in which murders often followed if a victim refused to pay. Victims or their families usually were only maimed since a corpse cannot pay tribute, but if they remained recalcitrant or it was felt that an object-lesson murder or two would shake loose money from other potential victims, death by gun, knife, bomb, rope or poison could well follow. The average victim paid immediately upon receiving a demand for money usually "signed" at the bottom with a hand that had been dipped in black ink (a procedure that was altered as the science of fingerprinting came into vogue). The terror it struck in most targets was simply overwhelming.
In point of fact there was an actual Society of the Black Hand in Europe, but it had nothing to do with either the Mafia or Camorra, the two largest criminal societies in Italy, who practiced extortion rackets there while members immigrated to America. The Society of the Black Hand was of Spanish origin and formed during the Inquisition as a force of good, seeking to prevent the oppression of the day. According to popular theories, the Mafia and Camorra also started out with noble intent and later turned into criminal bodies. The Society of the Black Hand merely withered away. But the name remained,
La Mano Nera
, or Black Hand, and it had an inspiring ring to New York newspapermen who had no intention of losing such a sinister phrase. The Black Hand was simply reborn as an organized force and reporters constantly traced various criminals back to some Black Hand Society.
In actuality the Black Hand was never more than a loosely run extortion racket practiced in the Little Italy sections of many American cities. It was not at all unusual for a businessman in financial trouble to send a Black Hand note to another businessman in hopes of solving his own money woes. When the recipient got such a note threatening him or members of his family, he automatically thought the Black Handers were most likely mafioso or Camorra gangsters. Certainly when the great opera tenor Enrico Caruso got a Black Hand threat with the imprint of a black hand and a dagger, he took the threat seriously and paid the $2,000 demanded. When the extortionists then presented a new demand for $15,000, he realized he had to go to the police or he would be the target of constant demands. The police set a trap and the Black Handers were caught when they tried to retrieve the loot from under the steps of a factory. They turned out to be private businessmen who figured Caruso was a natural for taking. The pair was convicted of extortion and sent to prison, one of the very few successful prosecutions of Black Handers. Thereafter Caruso was considered to be in danger from other Black Handersa successful prosecution was bad for businessand he was kept under police and private detective protection both in this country and Europe for the rest of his life.
Mafia and Camorra gangsters never struck at Caruso but they did at other uncooperative victims just to demonstrate that it was wise to pay. Often they applied a convincer to a victim by first seizing his child and cutting off a finger. A typical Black Hand case involved a well-to-do Brooklyn butcher named Gaetano Costa who, in 1905, got a Black Hand threat: "You have more money than we have. We know of your wealth and that you are alone in this country. We want $1,000, which you are to put in a loaf of bread and hand to a man who comes in to buy meat and pulls out a red handkerchief." Costa was an exception in his neighborhood; most other businessmen in the area had paid on demand. He ignored the demands. One morning Black Hand killers marched into his shop and shot Costa to death behind his meat counter. No one was ever charged in the case, although it was generally known that the gangsters who did the killing worked for Lupo the Wolf, a Black Hand mafioso headquartered in Italian Harlem.
For many years, Lupo, whose real name was Ignazio Saietta, was the foremost Black Hander in New York City. He maintained a notorious "Murder Stable" where more than 60 gangland victims, many recalcitrant Black Hand targets, were buried. Lupo paraded his Black Hand activities openly to the Italian community, thus reinforcing the perception that he was untouchable by the law. It was common for many Italians to cross themselves at the mere mention of his name.
Another Black Hander who considered himself immune from legal interference was Paul Di Cristina. He blithely delivered his Black Hand extortion notes in
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person to his New Orleans victims. They all paid, trembling in fear. All, that is, save a grocer named Pietro Pepitone. After Di Cristina visited Pepitone he sent his enforcers around later to collect. Pepitone announced he would not pay. For such effrontery Di Cristina sent word he'd come personally to collect his money. When Di Cristina strutted toward the grocer's store, Pepitone wordlessly picked up a shotgun, came out to the sidewalk and blew the Black Hander away.
In 1908 New York police estimated that for every Black Hand extortion they heard about at least 250 went unreported. If that was accurate, Black Hand depradations were truly staggering since there were 424 Black Hand offenses reported that year. Yet as big an industry as Black Handing was in New York, activities were undoubtedly greater in Chicago where it was estimated that upward of 80 different gangs operated, all unrelated to each other.
By about 1920 the Black Hand operators disappeared. Lupo the Wolf was in prison, albeit for counterfeiting, his second favorite pastime. Many members of the Sam Cardinella Black Hand ring in Chicago went to prison with Sam and his top aides were executed. The Di Giovanni mob in Kansas City suffered a number of convictions as did extortionists in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Some credit for the decline in Black Handing is given to federal officials who from 1915 started enforcing the laws prohibiting the use of the U.S. mail to defraud, but this came about only after considerable newspaper pressure. The extortionists shifted to private delivery of their notes.
However, by 1920 the exodus from the profession was enormous. Frankie Yale in Brooklyn, Scarface Di Giovanni in Kansas City, Vincenzo Cosmanno and the Genna brothers in Chicago all quit. They entered the much more profitable booze game, which writer Edward Dean Sullivan described as "No workslight riskvast remuneration." By comparison Black Hand setups were penny ante. Only a few unimaginative criminals kept at extortion and they were soon caught by the police, who suddenly got a steady flow of complaints from residents in Little Italies.
Bootlegging had turned the Italian communities into massive moonshine factories, with most families producing liquor for the bootleg gangs to sell. As these cottage industries developed, the Italian immigrants lost their fear of the police and saw they were actually in partnership with them, both being paid off by the bootleg gangs. And when you have a partner, you don't hesitate to ask a favor of him, such as taking care of this Black Hander who is bothering you.
See also:
Cardinella, Salvatore "Sam"; Lupo the Wolf; Shotgun Man; White Hand Society
.
Black Mafia
One of the myths gaining currency about syndicate crime in America is that other ethnic groups will take over the basically Italian-Jewish combination that has ruled the underworld for well over half a century. This overlooks the fact that the development of organized crime (actually "syndicated crime," since any crime involving a gang of two or more members is "organized") was in fact an aberration due to a confluence of socioeconomic forces not likely to be repeated.
According to the "take-over" theory and what Ralph Salerno, former head of the organized crime intelligence squad in New York City, calls the Black Mafia, the members of syndicated crime have become upwardly mobile and will be replaced by those of lower-class status. It is a theory easily made but difficult to prove.
Crime springs from ghettos and the current occupants of ghettos are increasingly black and Hispanic, thus giving rise to speculation about a Black Mafia and a Cuban, or Latin, Mafia. There is no doubt that, as today's ghetto occupants, these ethnic groups have become the prime criminalsin terms of ordinary crimethat the Jews and Italians were before them and the Irish before that.
However, fundamental differences exist. The 19th-century Irish criminals, the largest such group by far at the time, were "organized" in the sense of having enormous gangs. But these Irish gangs were not syndicated. The Dead Rabbits gang in New York, for instance, did not have any special relationship with the Bloody Tubs in Philadelphiano special working arrangements dividing up crime territories and activities. They did not sit in council as Angelo Bruno of Philadelphia's 20th-century crime family parleyed with Joe Bonnano of New York or Joe Zerilli of Detroit. The Irish gangs were organized, but there were no special arrangements that a New York gangster had to make with the Bloody Tubs before he killed someone in Philadelphia or Baltimore (to where the Tubs' influence extended).
The Jewish-Italian crime syndicate came about because of very special socioeconomic conditions in the United States. Surely Prohibition and the Great Depression help explain why organized syndicate crime developed in this country, and in a form that is unique throughout the world. Syndicate crime in the United States, in operation, was and is more pervasive than organized criminal activities anywhere in the world, including the Mafia's homeland of Sicily.
Why was this aberration possible only in the United States? Firstly, there was Prohibition, probably the most sweeping social experiment of the 20th century short of social revolution. Without Prohibition the upward mobility of Jewish and Italian gangsters would have

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