The Mafia Encyclopedia (89 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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BOOK: The Mafia Encyclopedia
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Page 254
Butsey was at the time dying of cancer and his motive in this, says Teresa in his book
My Life in the Mafia
, had nothing to do with trying to clear his namehe was generally identified as the first Mafia boss of Rhode Islandbut rather to shield his adopted son from the unwanted publicity. Butsey insisted to the boy he had nothing to do with the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Teresa said he asked Butsey, "What the hell are you suing them for? You can't beat a newspaper."
Butsey replied, "What they said was true, but it's going to hurt my kid. I don't give a damn about myself. I'm ready to die anyway. But look what it's doing to my boy. He's a legitimate kid. He never knew what was going on before."
As to the murders, Butsey told Teresa: "We whacked them out, we killed those guys in the robbery. These two greaseballs took it on the chin.... That shows you how much justice there really is."
The fact that Teresa's testimony has been considered reliable enough to lead to the indictment or conviction of more than 50 mob figures certainly lends his disclosure about Sacco and Vanzetti a considerable measure of credibility.
Further reading:
My Life in the Mafia
by Vincent Teresa with Thomas C. Renner.
Morello, Nicholas (18661916): Mafia leader
Great men are creations of their times. When Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky formed the national crime syndicate in the early 1930s, they succeeded because the underworld could at that time be logically organized. But Luciano was not the first to dream of a national crime syndicate. Nicholas Morello, of the notorious Morello family, rose far above his relations to realize that the Americanization of the gangs would have to give birth to a great criminal network, each of its components at peace with the others and in concert controlling all the rackets in the country.
Morello probably saw less need to cooperate with other ethnics than Luciano would later, mainly because during World War I the great ethnic Irish and Jewish criminal gangs were disintegrating. This was even true to some extent of the Italian gangs, but the mafiosi and Camorristas maintained their cohesion. (With the later advent of Prohibition the Irish and Jewish mobs would reorganize.)
In fact, Morello should have had an easier time organizing crime in America than Luciano and Lansky would later, but he found himself too mired down by old-country conflicts. While Morello's Sicilian gangs controlled the rackets of East Harlem and Greenwich Village in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Camorristas, immigrant criminals from the Camorra gangs of Naples, extended their power in Brooklyn, collecting protection money from Italian storekeepers, coal and ice dealers and other businessmen, as well as operating rackets on the Brooklyn docks.
The Camorristas were under the leadership of Don Pelligrino Morano, a man who had his own dreams of expansionall aimed solely at eliminating the Manhattan mafiosi. When Morano ordered his men to move in on the East Harlem rackets, money considerations were probably secondary. He really looked to demean his Old World rivals.
The more forward-looking Morello thought it foolish to continue such old battles and offered to make a peaceful settlement. Morano took such a move as a sign of weakness and spurned the offer. By1916 the warfare was so intense that only the most hardy mafioso or Camorrista dared cross the East River into the other's domain. They usually returned home in a hearse.
Then, surprisingly, that same year Morano announced he was in favor of Morello's call for an armistice. He invited Morello to come to Brooklyn to discuss terms, of course guaranteeing him safe conduct.
Morello proved wisely cautious and for six months did no more than dicker about holding such a peace meeting, though he realized he would have to go if he hoped to advance his master plan. The meeting was arranged in a cafe on Navy Street, and Morello showed up accompanied only by his personal bodyguard. Morano was deeply disappointed. He had hoped Morello would bring his top lieutenants with him. Still, Morello was the main prize, and as soon as the mafioso and his bodyguard stepped from their car, a five-man execution squad opened up on them, killing them in broad daylight.
Morano was greatly surprised when he was arrested for murder. He had been under the assumption that the payoffs he had made to a New York police detective, Michael Mealli, had "cleared the operation with the cops." Some of the killers cooperated with the law for lighter sentences and Morano and his top aides were sent to prison for life. When the sentence was pronounced, the
Brooklyn Eagle
reported: "Morano was surrounded by a dozen Italians who showered kisses on his face and forehead. On the way to the jail other Italians braved the guard and kissed Morano's hands, cheeks and forehead."
With Morello dead and Morano imprisoned, what the newspapers called the first Mafia War came to an end. So too did the dreams of Nick Morello for a "great combination'' of the gangs. At the time Salvatore Luciana was only a teenage thug, but already he appreciated what Morello had tried to do. When he grew older he would
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Americanize his name to Charles "Lucky" Luciano and he would Americanize the Mafia as well.
See also:
Morello Family
.
Morello, Peter "the Clutching Hand" (18801930): Early mafioso
One of the most important members of the notorious Morello family, Peter Morello "the Clutching Hand," was a devious killer whose tactics terrified his enemies. During the 1920s he was the bodyguard-adviser to Joe the Boss Masseria, regarded at the time as the most important mafioso in New York. Joseph Bonnano (Joe Bananas), shortly thereafter a boss of one of New York's five crime families, made it clear why Morello was also called "the old fox"he did Masseria's thinking for him.
The Clutching Hand was cut down in August 1930 during the Castellammarese War. By whom is a matter of some dispute. Informer Joe Valachi insisted the job was done by Buster of Chicago, a mysterious hit man imported by Salvatore Maranzano, the leader of the anti-Masseria forces. This, like much of Valachi's testimony, has been viewed with considerable doubt by Mafia watchers. Morello was cut down in his East Harlem business office, and it is doubtful that a stranger like Buster could have gotten to him, especially since at the moment he was handling a huge amount of cash, receipts from his loan-sharking racket.
Far more believable is Lucky Luciano's version. The ambitious Luciano, like Morello, was allied with Joe the Boss, but he had decided by then that the time was ripe to get rid of Masseria. That being the case it was decided that Morello had to die first. As long as Morello lived, Masseria was considered impregnable, and even if the Boss were killed, Morello would undoubtedly go underground to carry on a fierce war with Luciano.
Luciano assigned Albert Anastasia and Frank Scalise to the job and they were able to penetrate Morello's headquarters. They found Morello with a collector in his operation, Giuseppe Pariano, and, as Luciano put it, "he hadda get it too." As a bonus, Anastasia and Scalise appropriated the $30,000 in cash lying on Morello's desk.
See also:
Morello Family; Scalise, Frank "Don Cheech
."
Morello Family: Early American mafiosi
The first Mafia family firmly established in this country was literally a family of criminals. The Morellos settled in New York in the latter part of the 19th century, after emigrating over the years from the Sicilian town of Corleone, a community credited with supplying more Mafia members to America than any other place on the island.
The American head of the huge clan of brothers, halfbrothers and brothers-in-law was Antonio Morello, a brutal and cunning criminal credited with personally committing between 30 and 40 murders in the 1890s. His two younger brothers, Joe and Nick, succeeded him to leadership. Joe was noted as even more vicious, and with his brother-in-law, the notorious Lupo the Wolf, operated the so-called Murder Stable in East Harlem where enemies or victims of the gang were taken and either convinced to give in or tortured and killed. The screams in the night from the Murder Stable were an awesome yet frequent sound in East Harlem. But Joe lacked the vision to be a great crime leader and he was soon superseded by his brother Nicholas. Not illogically, Nick Morello was described later as an early version of Lucky Luciano in that he also dreamed about forming a great criminal syndicate to run all major rackets in the country. However, he was assassinated by Brooklyn Camorristas in 1916, and the superstructure that was to become national organized crime remained unbuilt for another decade and a half.
Nick was the last Morello to achieve leadership of the clan, which later passed on to Ciro Terranova, who maintained, despite personal weakness, a measure of authority in the Mafia until the 1930s. Peter "the Clutching Hand" Morello rose to near top power as the number one adviser to Joe the Boss Masseria, but he was killed during the Castellammarese War in 1930. His demise, since he was clearly the brains of the Masseria loyalists, assured the doom of Joe the Boss.
This hardly spelled the end of the Morellos in organized crime. Today a great many Morello descendants remain entrenched in various New York-New Jersey Mafia rackets.
See also:
Morello, Nicholas; Morello, Peter "The Clutching Hand"; Murder Stable; Terranova, Ciro
.
Moretti, Willie (18941951): Syndicate boss
In his day, Willie Moretti was a tough enforcer and syndicate boss, a power in New Jersey rackets to whom extortion, dope pushing and murder were part of the normal way of doing business. By the time he died in what the mob regarded as a "mercy killing," he was a clown, the comic relief at the Kefauver hearings, and a real threat to the mob with his loose lip. That was to prove to be the end of tough Willie Moore, as he was sometimes known.
A boyhood friend of Frank Costello, Moretti was in his younger days as rough and ready as any gangster. In New Jersey, he bossed an enforcer troop of about 60 gunmen, who protected his longtime partner, Longy
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Zwillman, and his own racket interests. The racket interests were extensive, often intermingled with the New York interests of Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis and others.
New, York Times
crime reporter Meyer Berger once observed, ''the Morettis had their bookmaking agents among workers in the major factories in Bergen, they shared the bookmaking profits pouring into the New York mob's astonishingly widespread New Jersey wire system, and they were partners in plush casinos and so-called 'sawdust,' or dice barns deep into Pennsylvania.''
Their top casino in Bergen was the Marine Room in the famed Riviera nightclub, located just north of the George Washington Bridge on the Palisades. The Riviera was a nightclub with top entertainers. The floorshow was open to the public; getting into the gambling room was another matter. All the players had to be known or they had to stay in the dining rooms and watch the show.
Moretti was known within the underworld as singer Frank Sinatra's original godfather. They had become fast friends when the singer from Hoboken was performing for peanuts in local roadhouses and clubs. In 1939, Sinatra, while singing with Harry James's orchestra, made his first hit recording, "All or Nothing at All." Band leader Tommy Dorsey signed him for what Sinatra must have regarded as a princely sum, $125 a week. Sinatra's popularity was soaring thanks to the
(Left) Willie Moretti ran off at the mouth
at Kefauver hearings, providing much entertainment for senators
and the television audience. The mob was much less amused.
Moretti met with the inevitable bloody consequences.
bobbysoxers who followed him everywhere. But he was locked in by his contract to Tommy Dorsey. The muchrepeated underworld tale of what happened is this: One night Willie Moretti showed up at Dorsey's dressing room and stuck a gun into the band leader's mouth. Moretti then suggested that Dorsey might sell Sinatra's contract. The price agreed on was one dollar.
A few years after that Moretti started acting funny at times, showing the first signs of mental illness brought on by the ravages of untreated syphilis. Moretti loved to gamble and claimed to be winning bets on horses for millions of dollars. He tried to place bets on horses and races that didn't exist. He even started at times to talk about syndicate affairs, matters that were not to be mentioned in public. Eventually quite a few capos loyal to Costello began saying Willie was a threat to everyone.
Costello had been best man at Willie's wedding and held him in high affection. Costello decided the best thing to do with Moretti was to get him out of the line of fire, sending him for a long vacation out West with a male nurse. Moretti frequently telephoned Costello, in conversations wiretapped by the police, begging to be allowed to come back. Costello refused and went on protecting Willie from himself. Only when Moretti became less voluble was he allowed to return.
When Moretti was called before the Kefauver committee, many mobsters wanted him knocked off, even though he had been behaving better. Costello again prevented it, and after much stalling Moretti finally appeared before the Senate committee. He proceeded to talk and talk and talk, though he said very little. No, he explained, he was not a member of the Mafia because he didn't have a membership card. And he offered such pearls of wisdom as "They call anybody a mob who makes six percent more on money"; and concerning gangsters he knew: "well-charactered people don't need introductions." When Moretti left the stand, the committee members seemed satisfied. Senator Estes Kefauver thanked him for his forthrightness, and Senator Charles Tobey found his frankness "rather refreshing."
"Thank you very much," Willie replied to the praise. "Don't forget my house in Deal if you are down on the shore. You are invited."
The mob was quite pleased with how Moretti had handled himself on the witness stand, but Willie started to deteriorate in late 1951. He talked regularly to New Jersey newspapermen and made noise about holding a press conference to review gambling in New Jersey. Vito Genovese, a Costello enemy, began strong lobbying for Moretti's execution. Genovese knew that if he could get rid of Moretti he could move his own men into Willie's operations and further erode the power of Costello. Moretti, Genovese said, was losing his mind, and the entire organization could be in trouble. "If

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