It was a fact that various crime families around the country were for decades running junkets to Las Vegas, to pre-Castro Cuba, to Antigua, to Haiti, to the Grand Bahamas, to Portugal, to London, to Communist Yugoslaviato name just some of the spots. The mob, working together with casinos they owned or those they cooperated with, learned of the joys of casino junkets decades ago.
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The gimmick involves getting together a group of high rollers who journey to the casino on a cost-free basis. Typical would be a junket from, say, Boston or Pittsburgh to Las Vegas to, say, the Sahara (which at one time paid $50 a head for gamblers so transported). All the gamblers would have to have good credit ratings and also fill out an application stating, besides their source of income, how much credit they had, their banks, their investments and their real estate holdings. The casino ran a credit check and once their credit was approved, they would join a flight to Las Vegas with all food, accommodations and airline tickets paid for by the casino. The only expenses the gamblers had were tip money, telephone callsand what they spent gambling. Mobs putting together a package of 100 gamblers would make $5,000 a popstill small potatoes. On many foreign junkets the payoff is enormous, and the junket operators are cut in for a percentage of what each gambler bets.
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Since the mob knows it is dealing with genuine "high rollers" on the junkets, all transactions are done on credit. On a trip to the Colony Sports Clubfor years the top gambling casino in London, fronted by actor George Raft, but really controlled by top mobster Meyer Lanskyhigh rollers got for $1,000 free transatlantic transportation, room, board and $820 in chips. These chips were non-negotiable and had to be used for betting purposes. Once the gambler ran through his chips he could order more on credit from the casino. Thus the casino and the junket operators had an exact count on how much each gambler lost. The mob junket operator would get a 25 percent kickback on all monies each high roller lost. It would be unusual for junkets of 20-25 high rollers not to net the operator at least $50,000 and usually much more in commissions.
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The casinos for their part know that getting gamblers into their establishments is all that is needed. Thereafter, greed and compulsion will provide them with a healthy guaranteed margin of profit.
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See also:
Colony Sports Club
.
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Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily
No Sicilian town has supplied organized crime in America with more important leaders than Castellammare del Golfo, a picturesque town situated deep inside an emerald gulf on the western coast of the island. Most important of these leaders were Salvatore Maranzano, the last man to attempt to place the old-line Sicilian Mafia brand on the American underworld, and Joseph Bonanno (Joe Bananas), the youngest man ever to take control of an American crime family. Others included Joe Profaci, head of a Brooklyn crime family, and Stefano Magaddino, Gaspar Milazzo and Joe Aiello, heads of crime families or
capos
, in Buffalo, Detroit and Chicago respectively. Joseph M. Barbara Sr. the host of the notorious mob meeting in Apalachin, New York, in 1957 was another Castellammarese, having come to the United States in 1921 and being at first involved in rackets in Pennsylvania as well as being a suspect in a number of gangland-style murders.
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Because so many mobsters were from Castellammare, they naturally aligned themselves with Salvatore Maranzano in the struggle with the older-line mafiosi headed by Joe the Boss Masseria. In fact, the war between the two groups became known as the Castellammarese War, mainly because Maranzano shrewdly built up the myth that his opponents hated all things Castellammarese. The war ended when Joe the Boss was assassinated through the deceit of his aide Lucky Luciano, who switched allegiance to Maranzano. Later on Luciano engineered the murder of Maranzano.
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With the death of both old-country leaders, Luciano announced that "knockin' guys off just because they come from a different part of Sicily, that kind of crap," was out. Thereafter, since it "was givin' us a bad name and we couldn't operate until it stopped," Castellammarese as well as other Sicilians got killed not for hometown affiliations, but strictly for business.
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See also:
Castellammarese War
.
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Castellammarese War: Mafia struggle for supremacy
In the 1920s the Mafia in New York gained its most powerful leader to datea crude, stocky little animal named Giuseppe Masseria, or "Joe the Boss," as he wanted to be called. There had been better, tougher and smarter mafiosi before him but Masseria came to power during Prohibition and accrued his strength from the huge revenues bootlegging brought gangsters. With that and his overwhelming firepower, he could squash most opposition within the Italian underworld, whether the Mafia, the Camorra or freelance.
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However, Masseria was considered crude, greedy and short-sighted by the young, sometimes American-born mafiosi around town. They hated his demands for personal power, trappings of "respect" and "dignity" and other old-country virtues which in their view prevented them from growing richer. Masseria sought to prevent the Young Turks from working with the power-
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