The Mafia Encyclopedia (71 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 199
most as weak in the thought department and particularly annoying to Gotti.
This stripping of Gotti's position indicated further degradations or "knockdowns" to be meted out later by Castellano. It was enough for Gotti to decide that he would have to strike at Castellano quickly.
Kiss of Death: Mafia murder signal
The "kiss of death"an opponent informed by a kiss on the lips that his days are numbered. Contrary to standard mob m.o.catch the victim unawarethe kiss is an indication of danger, or a warning. When an errant debtor is cornered by several toughs and so kissed, he will suddenly find the inspiration to come up somehow with the money he owes. Occasionally it has been used on relatively hapless victims who cannot fight back, such as frightened targets of Black Hand extortionists or "debt collectors" for shylock operators.
Vito Genovese, not one of the smartest although one of the most brutal mob leaders, gave Joe Valachi a kiss for "old times' sake" while they were both imprisoned in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. It backfired and turned Valachi into one of the most important informers in underworld history. Genovese clearly did so because he wanted to demonstrate to othersboth in the prison and outsidehow potent his power remained. What it did in the final analysis was prove that his power was limited.
Probably no Italian crime leader was as contemptuous of the Mafia custom of kissing as Lucky Luciano. Upon his ascent to power in 1931, he ordered the act stopped even as a form of greeting when mafiosi met. Such public acts, Luciano understood, might strike terror in the hearts of Sicilian peasants but were counterproductive in the United States.
"After all," he said, "we would stick out kissing each other in restaurants and places like that."
Knockdown: Demotion, Mafia style
A "knockdown" is the most desirable type of demotion in the Mafia, since it has the merit of saving the mobster from being hit. A prerequisite is that the mobster's offense did not cost the mob money, which is a capital offense. For instance, if a capo (or lieutenant) fails to support his wife and family according to mob standards, he might simply be reduced to the rank of a mere soldier.
This has happened to a number of former big-timers. One was Marshall Caifano, a longtime member of the Capone mob and later Chicago's representative in Las Vegas overseeing the mob's casino interests. He was terrible at the job and attracted too much attention to himself by getting arrested in brawls. Eventually the true Chicago godfather, Tony Accardo, demoted him to the status of a common soldier and gave him only menial tasks as punishment for his incompetence. Caifano was smart enough to take it and in his 60s got permission to relocate to Florida. Accardo spoke disparagingly of him, urging he be given very little, "but don't let him starve."
One who was not about to take a knockdown was John Gotti. It was obvious in 1985 that Paul Castellano was planning to knock Gotti down. First, he took away Gotti's "king's man" status, that is a capo with the right to direct contact with the boss whenever he wanted. Then Gotti and his supporters learned that Castellano was getting ready to break up the Ravenites, Gotti's crew. Gotti would be reduced to the status of a common soldier, and both he and his crew would be cut off from the prime sources of income. Most likely Castellano planned to have Gotti killed later for rebelling against the boss's will. In this case the knockdown never happened. Gotti and his supporters assassinated Castellano and took over the crime family.
See also:
King's Man
.
Korshak, Sidney (19071996): Fabled fixer for the mob
Until his death in January 1996 at age 88, Sidney Korshak was known as a master fixer beyond compare and the mob's man in Hollywood and other points in the West. Despite or because of this, Korshak moved easily in Tinseltown, proving himself an indispensable ally for movie producers, top business executives and politicians.
Korshak always carried out the instructions of the Chicago Outfit, which nursed him with great skill, warning lower level mobsters never to approach him lest they bring down his reputation for integrity and trust. As Chicago mob boss Joey Aiuppa once told a minor mobster: "Don't put any heat on Sid. He can't be seen in public with guys like us. We have our own ways of contacting him." It was apparent the warning came with penalties up to and including death for disobeying. Korshak himself knew where his power came from. As Chicago capo Murray Humphreys once reamed him out, he reminded Korshak that he was "our man, we raised you, you drop everything when we call."
Korshak exercised his power, and that power reached around the globe even for rather mundane tasks. One time comedian Alan King, long a performer in Vegas, was coldly informed by a desk clerk at a plush European hotel that there were no rooms available. King went to a lobby phone booth and placed a call to Korshak in Los Angeles. Before he even hung up, the desk clerk was knocking on the phone booth door to inform King his suite was ready.
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Others held Korshak's demonstrations of power in considerable awe. An admiring Robert Evans, the former head of Paramount, related in his 1994 book
The Kid Stays in the Picture
what the master fixer could accomplish with single phone calls, especially to take care of "labor problems": "Let's just say that a nod from Korshak, and teamsters change management. A nod from Korshak and Santa Anita and Vegas shut down. A nod from Korshak, and the Dodgers can suddenly play night baseball."
Evans had special reason to be both admiring and grateful to Korshak. When the producer wanted Al Pacino for the top role in
The Godfather
, Sid rather quickly got the actor released from his exclusive contract at MGM.
Korshak was the son of a wealthy Chicago family and got his law degree from DePaul University in 1930. Almost immediately he was handling the defense for members of the Capone crime syndicate. As such, Korshak, who often boasted that he paid off judges, was shunned by the city's business elite. That was until it was found that he could squash demands from legitimate unions by arranging instant sweetheart contracts with other, very pliable unions, often the Teamsters.
By the late 1940s Hollywood beckoned him, as moviemakers were likewise entranced with his ability to bring labor peace. Korshak became a close buddy of many moguls, including Lew Wasserman, Kirk Kerkorian and the late Charlie Bludhorn who had taken over Paramount Pictures.
One of the most ardent fans of Korshak was the onetime president of the Teamsters, Jackie Presser, who later described him as "the smoothest sonovabitch in the business. There's nothing he can't fix ... and he don't even have an office. This guy don't even have a briefcase. Keeps everything in his head."
Korshak conducted his business from the Bistro in Beverly Hills, ensconced at a corner table, flanked by two telephones that kept ringing, and in between calls he had private chats with friends and beautiful women who came by to give him a friendly kiss. His business calls were said to come from such clients as Schenley, Diners' Club, the Chargers, the Dodgers, the Knicks, the Rangers, Seeburg, National General, racetracks around the country, hotel chains such as Hyatt and Hilton and probably another hundred top companies. Whenever he got a call relating to the affairs of his Chicago clients, he would leave his table with a bagful of coins to conduct business from one of scores of telephone booths.
If a union cooked up a strike, reliable Sid would "arbitrate" it, but there would be no under-the-table payoff. Instead Korshak would have a big legal bill mailed to his Chicago office; he never attempted to get a law license in California, which made his activities much harder to trace. Sid would pay the full taxes on the sum and cut up the balance with his mob allies through his "handler," Gus Alexall nice and clean.
Korshak's main activities for the mob were most appealing to a number of legitimate enterprises, in particular his ability to tap millions of dollars from the Teamsters' notorious Central States Pension Fund, which did much to finance the growth of the Las Vegas casino industry.
Personally, Sid lived the good life. His wife played tennis with Dinah Shore and other important women, and Korshak himself never seemed to be without female friends. Back in his Chicago days, he was known for giving wild late-night parties at which were always the most beautiful and accommodating showgirls. A former Chicago judge told the
New York Times
in 1987, "Sidney always had contact with high-class girls. Not your $50 girl, but girls costing $250 or more."
Mobsters often talked enviously among themselves about Korshak's private life. John Roselli, the Chicago mob's longtime overseer in Vegas, observed that Sid had "been shacking up with Stella Stevens for years." It was said that Sid was also responsible for seeing that other female friends got anchor spots on some leading Hollywood gossip TV shows.
In an era when mob figures were constantly coming to violent ends, Sid Korshak was too valuable to face any danger.
Page 201
L
Labor Leasing: Trucking racket
A mark of organized crime's hold on the Teamsters Union is its ability to work rackets that allow it to get rich while union truckers are thrown out of work. In the 1970s Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano, later imprisoned for murder, came up with the "labor leasing" racket. Tony Pro was a vice president of the Teamsters, a union which was expelled from the AFLCIO for corruption. He was also a capo in the Genovese family.
Under the Provenzano setup, firms that used a high volume of trucking, such as furniture manufacturers and retail chain stores, would be guided to "laborleasing" companies, which were connected with Tony Pro, to provide drivers for their trucks. These laborleasing companies, controlled by mafiosi, took the work on a fee basis and then paid drivers at a scale far below that paid union members under the Teamsters' National Master Freight Agreement. This meant the union drivers who had previously worked directly for the firms needing truckers were thrown out of work while nonunion, lower paid drivers working directly for the leasing company essentially took over their jobs.
The fact that so many mafiosi or members of their families have gone into running such leasing outfits or into the trucking business in general is often cited as proof that with the passage of time the Mafia is "going legit." Other observers see it as nothing more than the Mafia's supreme ability at innovation in racketeering.
Langella, Gennaro "Jerry Lang" (1939 ): Colombo crime family leader
There was some dispute as to Jerry Langella's position in the Colombo crime family in the mid-1980s. According to some he was merely the acting boss while Carmine "the Snake" Persico was doing time. Others maintained Langella had wrested control from Persico and had no intention of letting the violence-prone Snake get back into power. It was going to be an interesting confrontation if and when Persico, who had done 10 years in prison out of the last 13 and was facing more charges, got out.
Langella, who started in the Brooklyn mob family when he was 20, quickly gained a reputation as a man who could scare almost anyone when he wanted toand he did a stint as Persico's bodyguard. Langella, in a sense, epitomized a Young Turk in the New York Mafia and feuded with a number of older bosses of other Mafia families, claiming, for example, they were cutting the Colombo family, not considered to be in the same class with the Gambinos or Genoveses, out of a fair share of return on revenues for certain construction shakedowns.
Langella was known to have befriended certain other youthful elements in those families and is reputed to have warned allies of John Gotti (of the Gambinos), another Young Turk, that the elderly boss Paul Castellano feared him and would seek to kill him shortly after Christmas 1985. Gotti's patron in the crime family, underboss Aniello Dellacroce, had died on December 2. Nine days before Christmas Castellano was
Page 202
A youthful Jerry Langella, before he became head of the Colombo crime family
while Carmine Persico was behind bars, had by age 24 been picked up as
a "prime suspect" in a number of rubouts.
assassinated. Gotti was suspected of ordering the rubout and Langella was suspected of not being even a wee bit sorry about it.
Under Langella the Colombos have allegedly been greatly involved in narcotics trafficking, loan-sharking, gambling, hijacking, criminal receiving, bankruptcy frauds, counterfeiting, cigarette smuggling and pornography. On this last count it is said that two mafiosi, believed to be Colombos, showed up one morning at the offices of two of the most successful pornographic filmmakers in the East and asked if they had any personal belongings in their desks. The filmmakers asked why and the boys were very patient. "Because this is now ours," one said, "but we're letting you take your personal stuff. So hurry up and get out."
The men got out. It was your average everyday Mafia mob takeover. However, Langella's reign would prove short. He was hit with a mass of criminal charges that resulted in a 100-year sentence, and Persico's return was unhampered, save in due course by federal prosecution once again.
See also
Macintosh, Hugh "Apples
."
Lansky, Meyer (19021983): National crime syndicate founder
There was a godfather of the national crime syndicate, the parent organization of what became the American Mafiaand thus a real godfather of the American Mafia. He was called with total respect the "little man," and Lucky Luciano's advice to his followers was always "listen to him." He himself would brag with typical quiet elation: "We're bigger than U.S. Steel." And an agent of the FBI would say of him with grudging admiration: "He would have been chairman of the board of General Motors if he'd gone into legitimate business."
He was Maier Suchowljansky, better known as Meyer Lansky, a Jew from Grodno, Poland. While many mafiosi speak of "our thing" which excludes all but Italians, it is a matter of record that none of the top mafiosi ever excluded Meyer Lansky from anything. Only among the lower-rung levels of the Mafia was there any belief that Lansky, because he was not Italian, was just a money man to be respected and trusted, one who lacked real power to "vote" in the top councils.

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