The Mafia Encyclopedia (29 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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BOOK: The Mafia Encyclopedia
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Page 72
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.
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.
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.
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.
See also:
Colony Sports Club
.
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.
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.
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.
See also:
Castellammarese War
.
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.
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-
Page 73
ful non-Italian gangs. But the Young Turks watched Jewish and Irish mobsters grow fat while they were fed claptrap about "honor" and 'tradition."
Additionally these young rebels objected to the constant struggle for power within the Mafia. Not only were they supposed to battle other ethnics but they had to war among themselveswith Sicilians battling Neapolitans and, even more ridiculously, Sicilians battling Sicilians, depending often on which impoverished village of the impoverished island they came from.
By the late 1920s Masseria became obsessed with the growing power of mafiosi emigrating from the west coast Sicilian town of Castellammare del Golfo. They had achieved important positions in several cities, especially Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo, but their main power lay in Brooklyn. There the rackets were controlled by a newcomer, Salvatore Maranzano, a mafioso who nurtured his own. dream of becoming the boss of bosses. Soon war broke out. In the Masseria organization were such rising talents as Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, Frank Costello, Willie Moretti, Albert Anastasia and Carlo Gambino. Siding with Maranzano were such future crime leaders as Joe Profaci, Joe Bonanno, Joe Magliocco, and in due course, secret defectors from Masseria, Tommy Gagliano and Tommy Lucchese. However, almost none of these men owed much allegiance to their bosses, wanting only to have the Castellammarese War, as the conflict came to be called, ended.
While Masseria men killed Maranzano supporters and vice versa, a secret underground developed in the two camps, and the war actually became three-sided. The leader of this third force was Luciano who cultivated not only other Young Turks with Masseria but others supporting Maranzano. Tommy Lucchese especially kept him informed of moves being made by Maranzano.
There was considerable debate within the Luciano camp on which leader they should eliminate first. They had for months hoped that attrition would weaken both sides, but finally it was decided first to depose Joe the Boss, a task that was easier since Masseria trusted Luciano. The assassination was carried out in a Coney Island restaurant. Luciano and Joe the Boss had eaten lunch there and then played cards into the afternoon until no other diners were present. Then Luciano went to the toilet just before four of his supportersJoe Adonis, Bugsy Siegel, Vito Genovese and Albert Anastasiastormed in and filled Joe the Boss with bullets.
When the police arrived, Joe the Boss was dead. Luciano, who emerged from the men's room, had little to say, except that he'd heard the shooting and "as soon as I finished drying my hands, I walked out to see what it was all about." The press was being delicate when it reported Luciano's statement. His actual words were: "I was in the can taking a leak. I always take a long leak."
With Joe the Boss dead, Luciano and his allies made peace with Maranzano and agreed to accept him as their superior. Technically this marked the end of the Castellammarese War and Salvatore Maranzano crowned himself boss of bosses. A few months later Luciano arranged for Maranzano's execution so that in the end both original contending sides ended up dead losers. The real winner was Luciano and the new national crime syndicate, a conglomeration of variedethnic gangs, which became the real "organized crime" in America.
See also:
Luciano, Charles "Lucky"; Maranzano Salvatore; Masseria, Giuseppe "Joe the Boss"; Night of the Sicilian Vespers
.
Castellano, Paul (I 9151985): Assassinated crime boss
When Paul Castellano and his driver, Thomas Bilotti, were shot to death in front of a steakhouse on New York's East Side on December 16, 1985, the story made headlines around the country. The reason: "Big Paul," the Mafia's "boss of bosses" (which he was not) was the most feared don in America (which he also was not). Overlooked in virtually all accounts was that the assassinations, as the men stepped from a Lincoln limousine, had been one of the easiest hits on a Mafia don and his bodyguard ever. Neither Castellano nor Bilotti were armed, and neither had taken even the simple precaution of having a backup car of armed gunmen for protection.
Castellano had made a date with three mystery men and had a table reserved for them, Bilotti and himself in Sparks Steak House on bustling East 46th Street. (Probably half the mafiosi in the city could, if they wanted to, have learned where Big Paul would be on 5:30 P.M. on the day of the hit. Why, for safety's sake had he not made a last-minute change of meeting places? Chances are Castellano, if he'd made it into the restaurant, would not even have taken the precaution of having the reserved table switched.) But Bilotti and Castellano barely made it out of the limousine when three men wearing trenchcoats and fur hats approached, pulled out semi-automatic handguns and shot both men repeatedly in the face. One of the assassins paused long enough to fire a
coup de grace
into Castellano's head. The gunmen then fled on foot east to the corner of Second Avenue, one of them speaking into a walkie-talkie as he ran. Then they got into a waiting dark car that sped south and disappeared. It was a piece of cake.
Paul Castellano's death was an indication of his ignorance of the pulse of power in the Mafia. Had he been savvier, Castellano might well have anticipated
Page 74
Big Paul Castellano, Head of the
Gambino crime Family, lies shot to
death outside a Manhattan steak
house in 1985. Never popular with
His men, Castellano got his power in
1976 by edict of his dying brother-
in-law, Carlo Gambino. His murder
propelled John Gotti into
Mafia leadership.
danger. His doom was settled two weeks before the hit when his underboss Aniello Dellacroce, died of lung cancer. Castellano undoubtedly despised Dellacroce, a feeling that was mutual, but Big Paul did not understand that it was his underboss who had been keeping him alive. But when Carmine Galante was rubbed out in 1979, he at least had operated correctly. He was driven around town, never indicating where he'd be; and on the day of his death he was riding in Brooklyn when ''on the spur of the moment" he suggested a small restaurant where he wanted to eat. And still the hit men got him there.
Since becoming boss in 1976, Paul Castellano viewed himself as a different Mafia donmore polished, a businessman far more than a hood. He took the Gambino family more deeply into certain fields, such as the garment trade, trucking industries, construction unions. And he didn't forsake murder. A stolen-car operation he bossed, shipping valuable vehicles as far away as Kuwait, hardly eschewed homicide and apparently carried out 25 murders to get rid of bothersome witnesses and competitors. But Big Paul did object to a murder or two here and there, and in a sense that showed he was forgetting his own roots. That should have told him Mafia power, in the final analysis, belongs to the gunmen. Meyer Lansky always knew that. He too was a businessman, a far better one than Castellano, but he knew that his position had to be backed with muscle, and he had Bugsy Siegel and others around to provide as much firepower as was necessary.
Big Paul probably hated the shooters. He hated his underboss, a man capable of peering into a victim's eyes as he squeezed off a shot, who could watch the impact of instant death. Big Paul probably feared Dellacroce because he knew that the latter as underboss to Carlo Gambino normally would have stepped up to the top spot when Gambino died in 1976. Castellano had one edge on Dellacroce therehe was married to Gambino's sister. Don Carlo was a man who treasured family ties and was determined to make Castellano his successor. Gambino realized it was impossible for Castellano if Dellacroce wanted to fight. At the same time Gambino could hardly have Dellacroce killed. There were too many others in the mob ready to step up and nothing would restrain them, knowing Castellano's limitations. Gambino thus knew he had to deal with Dellacroce. He offered him all of the mob's lucrative Manhattan activities, thus giving his underboss a

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