in with some of his hoodlums. I threw him out and after that I traveled around in an armored car with one or two bodyguards. Capone didn't settle anything. And he didn't take over the newspapers as he wanted to do."
|
Whichever version is closer to the truth, Capone nevertheless had a way of influencing many newspapers. By the sheer virtue of his argument (and the unquestioned criminal ability he had to harass newspapers), he caused Hearst's
Chicago Evening American
to stop printing Capone's nickname of "Scarface" unless it was within a direct quote from someone like a police official.
|
As for Leo Brothers, he served only eight years of his sentence and was released, refusing to make any comments on the crime or on the sources of the money furnished him for his expensive legal defense. He maintained his silence until his death in 1951.
|
The Brothers solution has gotten short shrift over the years. In
Barbarians in Our Midst
, the definitive book on Chicago crime, Virgil W. Peterson, longtime head of the Chicago Crime Commission, speculates on various mobsters who might have killed Lingle. Brothers is deemed unworthy of mention. This view, hardly an oversight, apparently led a number of crime writers later to state that the Lingle murder was never officially solved. It was. It was just that hardly anybody paid the solution much mind.
|
See also:
Lingle, Alfred "Jake."
|
Bruno, Angelo (19101980): Philadelphia Mafia boss
Angelo Bruno was called "the Gentle Don." For the two decades that he ruled the Philadelphia crime family, it was one of the most peaceful in the nation.
|
Sicilian-born Angelo Bruno preached the quiet approach to his men. He ordered very few mob shootings and kept his organization out of the lucrative drug trade, a policy that earned him the approval of his neighbors and at least tacit acceptance by the authorities. Neil Welch, who later became special agent in charge of the FBI's Philadelphia office, said in effect that for years the agency had not pursued Bruno with any great vigor.
|
Bruno, a truly rare mafioso chieftain, was even capable of turning the other cheek when he was the object of a botched assassination try. He shrugged it off and did not subject the foe to reciprocity but rather merely enforced his retirement from the rackets. Even his own men faced his wrath for their violent ways. When in the mid-1960s family member Little Nicky Scarfo, whom Bruno probably considered a flake, stabbed a longshoreman to death in an argument over a restaurant seat, the godfather banished him to Atlantic City, then a depressed area. (By the mid-1980s it had become a glittering gambling mecca and Little Nicky was cock-of-the-walk.)
|
The Gentle Don was not around to see Atlantic City develop. On March 21, 1980, Bruno was sitting in his car after dinner when a shotgun blast blew a huge hole behind his right ear, killing him instantly. There was hardly any doubt the motive was Atlantic City. The other eastern families had long recognized Philadelphia's right to Atlantic City, when Philly's main source of revenue there was the numbers business in the ghettos. But the new big money action, they were known to feel, was more than Bruno could handle or, for that matter, deserved. In New York, federal authorities labeled Funzi Tieri, the boss of the Genovese family, as responsible for Bruno's eradication. Both the Genoveses and the Gambinos, then in close alliance under Tieri's leadership, had action in various parts of New Jersey and fully intended to grab the seashore city's gambling action. It may be assumed the Gentle Don objected too gently.
|
Officially the Bruno murder was unsolved and its consequences were to rip the previously quiet Philly crime family apart with two dozen gang murders in the next few years. Taking over after Bruno was the more violent Phil "Chicken Man" Testa, his underboss. Ten days after the Bruno assassination a local newspaper's resident horoscoper declared: "With Neptune in exact conjunction with his retrograde Jupiter, no matter what's going on, Testa will come out in a better position than he started." Unfortunately, the mafiosi in New York were not big on astrology.
|
See also:
Testa, Philip "Chicken Man."
|
Buccieri, Fiore "Fifi" (19041973): Chicago syndicate killer
Fiore Buccieri's nickname was Fifi, an unlikely moniker for the lord high executioner of the Chicago syndicate, Albert Anastasia's analog, and boss Sam Giancana's personal hit man. Giancana kept Buccieri very, very busy, not only as a murderer, but also as a bomber, arsonist, terrorist, labor union racketeer and loan shark. Buccieri was also a master of the threat.
|
Debtors paid up when Buccieri passed the word around to their friends, advising them not to ride in a car with the borrowerbecause he "is going to get hit." Buccieri sometimes had the "business" cards of his street men placed in employment offices; when a jobhunter was turned down, he was handed the business card of a Buccieri "loan officer." It might not seem too wise to lend money to men out of work, but Buccieri knew no genuinely bad riskhis clients paid up no matter what. If they were made to sweat enough, he explained, the money would come out of their pores. He was right. Men paid, even if they had to steal from their parents, their relatives, their friends, and their bosses. If necessary they would put their wives and
|
|
