The Mafia Encyclopedia (9 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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BOOK: The Mafia Encyclopedia
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and a $3,000 diamond ring. Scalise promptly sent his ring to his sweetheart in Sicily. Anselmi, less romantic, haggled $4,000 out of a jeweler, at the point of a gun, for the $3,000 ring.
The tales of their killings became the talk of the underworld. When one victim begged mercy with his hands held in prayer, the boys jokingly shot off his hands before shooting him in the head. They gunned down their victims on crowded streets, with absolutely no regard for innocent bystanders.
Anselmi and Scalise finally broke with the Gennas when they were given a contract to hit Al Capone, realizing that even if they succeeded, Capone's followers would sooner or later get them. Instead, they revealed the murder order to Capone and went to work for himwhile letting the Gennas think they were still in their employ. That way they were eventually able to set up one Genna brother for assassination and personally dispatch another.
Once the pair became open members of the Capone forces, they were quickly regarded as the gang's most efficient killers, outdoing even Machine Gun McGurn and Golf Bag Hunt. They took part in the most important Chicago murder of the 1920s, that of O'Banion. Later when a peace pact was almost worked out between the Capones and the O'Banions (then under the leadership of Hymie Weiss), the agreement foundered on the Weiss demand that Anselmi and Scalise be turned over to them for execution. Capone who prided himself on loyalty to his men, refused saying, ''I wouldn't do that to a yellow dog."
Anselmi and Scalise went about their murdering business. They were arrested any number of times but never convicted; somehow witnesses against them suddenly remembered they did not recognize them. The pair even beat a rap of murdering two police detectives. After three trials, a typical Chicago verdict found that they were just innocent gangsters resisting unwarranted police aggression.
Anselmi and Scalise were finally to die at Al Capone's hands in 1929, shortly after the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, for which they were arrested but did not live long enough to be tried. Capone had learned that Anselmi and Scalise with Joseph "Hop Toad" Giunta, whom he had installed as head of the fraternal Unione Siciliane, were conspiring with another Mafia crime family boss named Joe Aiello to kill him. At first Capone could not believe this of Anselmi and Scalise whom he had refused to sacrifice to Hymie Weiss, but another aide, Frankie Rio, convinced him of the pair's disloyalty with a contrived test. At a dinner Capone and Rio faked an argument and Rio slapped Capone and stormed out. The next day Anselmi and Scalise approached Rio full of sympathy and offered to bring him in on a plan to kill Capone. Rio dickered with the gangsters for three days and then reported back to Capone.
On May 7, 1929, Capone hosted a party to honor Giunta, Anselmi and Scalise. At the height of the banquet, Capone accused them of betraying him and, producing an Indian club, beat Giunta and Scalise with blow after blow until they slumped to the floor, near death. Then Capone turned to the quaking Anselmi, who looked awestruck at his murder partner and for the first time in his life turned on him. "Not me, Al," he begged. "Honest to God. Johnnie. It was his idea. His and Joe's. Believe me, Al, I wouldn't." Capone cut him off with a barrage of blows. Then Capone was handed a gun and he shot all three, finishing the gory job. Anselmi and Scalise died as they had always workedtogether.
Anslinger, Harry J. (18921975): U.S. narcotics commissioner
One of our most controversial lawmen in this century, Harry J. Anslinger was an implacable foe of the Mafia and consequently a major enemy of the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover, who for more than 30 years maintained the Mafia did not exist. For those same 30 years, Anslinger's men had been gathering names and identities of top gangsters in the United States. Eventually they compiled a list of 800 big names in national and international crime and a black book which was labeled
Mafia
. This can fairly be called the first federal study of the American Mafia and was done at a time when Hoover's "there-is-no-Mafia" line was generally accepted in law enforcement circles.
The rivalry between Hoover and Anslinger, in his prime a squat, bull-necked, bald, energetic man, was particularly intense. Each considered the other as both incompetent and a threat. But Hoover's disregard of and disrespect for Anslinger was not shared by Hoover's agents. In the early 1950s, Anslinger had provided them with a five-page list, four columns to a page, of the names and cities of over 300 crime family members. There were those who said the specter of organized crime was one that Hoover could not see because it had become visible to Anslinger first.
FBI agents surreptitiously circulated the "List of Mafia Members Obtained From Narcotics Bureau." It had to be done surreptitiously since any agent caught with the list would undoubtedly have been subjected to transfer and, more likely, to dismissal from the service. In his
Inside Hoover's FBI
Special Agent Neal J. Welch describes FBI men "burning' shiny grayish reproductions on primitive office copiers and passing the list secretly from agent to agent like some heretical religious creedwhich it was." Welch relates that when he
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became special agent in charge of the Detroit bureau, he was given a faded old copy of the Narcotics Bureau's list with an astounding notation: "In 1952, the Narcotics Bureau had the answers but no one would listen ... every LCN [La Cosa Nostra] member we have is on this list, without exception."
Anslinger clearly was a confirmed Mafia fighter long before Hoover finally was forced into the battle, but like Hoover he suffered certain performance defects. His overstated opinion of the dangers of marijuana, for instance, was in the 1960s to raise him to the status of a cult figure in the same way that
Reefer Madness
was and is a cult movie today. Anslinger can also be accused of following the headlines in the administration of his office. In 1942, only after the United States went to war with Japan, Anslinger reported to the secretary of the Treasury that there was ample proof that Japan had violated its international commitments for years by its promotion of the opium trade and had used drugs as an offensive weapon against countries it was trying to conquer. "Wherever the Japanese army goes, the drug traffic followsú In every territory conquered by the Japanese a large part of the people become enslaved with drugsú" He noted this had been particularly true in Manchuria and China.
Like the complete bureaucrat, Anslinger followed every twist in American foreign policy and thus in time found the great drug menace was being masterminded by the Red Chinese, who were succeeded, coincidentally during the Korean War, by North Korea.
Anslinger was hewing to the sure road of popularity. With the arrival of the Kennedy administration, he was to embrace Attorney General Robert Kennedy. In his book,
The Protectors
, published shortly after the assassination of John Kennedy, Anslinger could not contain his praise for Bobby Kennedy, even lapsing into overstatement: "He [Bobby Kennedy] traveled over the country, calling special meetings with our agents, exhorting them to nail the big traffickers. He would review every case with them personallyú He kept the prosecutors on their toes and promised the utmost effort in court to bring about convictionsú" Unfortunately Anslinger also proclaimed: "It was, in large measure, due to his forceful encouragement of our men that we knocked off such public enemies as Vito Genovese, the number one gangster in the United States, Big John Ormento, Joe Valachi and Carmine Galante, and numerous others." The sad fact was that all these men, save the last, had been through the entire prosecution process from arrest to conviction to sentencing to incarceration before Robert Kennedy even took office.
Yet whatever his failings in a quest for popularity and headlines, a peril of the profession among lawmen, Harry J. Anslinger still qualified during his lifetime as the nation's number one and, some would say, only Mafia hunter.
Antinori, Ignacio (?1940): Early Florida Mafia boss
One of the more shadowy Mafia figures in U.S. history, Ignacio Antinori was the most powerful early leader in the Tampa, Florida, crime family. One of the oldest Mafia groups in the country, the Tampa family, through the years, figured significantly in the narcotics trade and simply ignored requests or directives from other crime families to curtail such activities. And no one ever seriously contemplated going into Tampa to do anything about it.
While Antinori's early history may be cloudy there is no doubt that by the 1920s he was one of the major narcotics bosses in the United States. Antinori, connectioned through bribery with officials high up in the Cuban government, godfathered a setup in which Tampa became the American end of a drug pipeline extending from Marseilles, France, through Cuba to Florida. Tampa took care of distribution in Florida and sent on supplies to the Midwest, especially to the Kansas City Mafia, where according to the Narcotics Bureau, it passed under the control of such mafiosi as Nicolo Impostato, James De Simone and Joseph De Luca in Kansas City and Thomas Buffa in St. Louis.
It should not be assumed that Antinori's influence within the Tampa organization was unrivaled. Law enforcement knowledge of the affairs of the Tampa family was limited, and by about 1930 Santo Trafficante Sr. may well have taken over as top boss. Certainly, when Antinori was murdered on October 22, 1940, the operations of the Tampa family went on without skipping a beat. Under the senior Trafficante, the family remained a power in narcotics, smuggling of aliens, loan-sharking and Florida gambling, as well as moving into Cuban gambling.
Apache Indian Job: Mob bombings
The bomb, long an underworld weapon, was used first in this country by Black Handers to terrorize victims. Later, in the labor racketeering field and in political campaigns (organized by the Capones), bombs were used as instruments of persuasion. Bombs also came in handy in convincing some businesses to accept the right beer and booze during Prohibition and others to come through with protection money. But, by the mid-1930s the custom fell into general disuse on a wholesale basis; bombings attracted more attention and public uproar than the politicians and police could ignore.
In the 1970s, firebombing came back into vogue with what the underworld called an Apache Indian job,
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a bombing so thorough that it is reminiscent of Indian attacks on settlers' cabinsnothing left standing except a chimney and a few smoking timbers.
New York restaurants that failed to pay tribute to the little-known but prosperous parsley racket were threatened with a firebombing. In the 1980s, the Montana State Crime Commission found the parsley racket had moved west under guidance of a New York crime family. Restaurants that failed to buy a large amount of parsleyso much that it would have to be served with every meal and with virtually every mixed drinkwere being hit by Apache Indian jobs.
See also:
Parsley Racket
.
Apalachin Conference: Underworld convention
The 1957 Apalachin, New York, Conference of the Mafia was a landmark in the history of crime in America. Ill fatedindeed, something of a comic operathe conference nonetheless had a profound affect on the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover, who for almost three decades had been denying the existence of both the Mafia and anything called organized crime. (It was a convenient stance for Hoover; after all, he could hardly be expected to combat what did not exist.)
The New York State Police raid on the Apalachin meeting created a thunderbolt in FBI headquarters. The late William C. Sullivan, Hoover's former assistant, related in his memoirs,
The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI:
"Hoover knew he could no longer duck and dodge and weave his way out of a confrontation with the Mafia, and he realized that his policy of nonrecognition left him and the FBI open to criticism."
To protect himself, Hoover launched the FBI into a giant game of catch-up, gathering all the information he could about the Mafia and organized crime. Apalachin (and Robert Kennedy's later appointment as attorney general) prompted an agency wiretap and eavesdropping campaign from which, some observers have pointed out, the FBI gained a lot of information, not all of which it understood. FBI surveillance men heard big mafiosi referring to "our thing," and not knowing better, capitalized the words and came up with a "new" criminal organizationLa Cosa Nostra. Happily for Hoover this gave him a sort of out. He didn't have to concede the existence of the Mafia and could stick with La Cosa Nostra or the LCN. No matter, it forced Hoover at last into the game, leaving the "there-ain't-no-Mafia'' school to a dwindling number of uninformed "experts"and, of course, to the mafiosi themselves.
But the Apalachin Conference was not intended to incite FBI investigations. By most theories the conference was mainly concerned with Vito Genovese's ascendancy plans in wake of the assassination just 20 days earlier of Albert Anastasia, as well as the earlier attempt on the life of Frank Costello.
The bare-bones history of the conference is easily stated: It never really got off the ground. Some 60 or more underworld leaders were on hand in Joseph Barbara's stone mansion in Apalachin when the sudden appearance of New York State troopers and federal agents disrupted matters. It was something of a modern version of the Keystone Kops in chase of the bad guys, starring immaculately groomed crime bosses, who, in their fifties and older, were hardly fleet of foot but were scurrying about, climbing out windows, bolting through back doors and diving through bushes, burrs and undergrowth while trying to escape. It can only be speculated exactly how many got away, but authorities the next day listed 58 detainees. While most of those arrested were from New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, a healthy representation of out-of-towners indicated the national interest of the conference. There were crime leaders from Florida, Texas, California, Illinois and Ohio. The arrest roster bore the names of men whom law enforcement had tried for years to net: Trafficante, Profaci, Genovese, Magliocco, Bonanno, DeSimone, Scalish, Riela, Gambino, Magaddino, Catena, Miranda, Zito, Civello, Ida, Ormento, Coletti, Galante. Of the 58, 50 had arrest records, 35 had convictions and 23 had served prison sentences. Eighteen had been involved in murder investigations, 15 netted for narcotics violations, 30 for gambling and 23 for illegal use of firearms.
The conference might simply have been broken up on account of a state police sergeant who, suspecting that something was up at the Barbara mansion, ordered the raid. However, such an interpretation requires a certain suspension of critical analysis. The fact that Vito Genovese became the emperor caught without his clothes and was destroyed at the meeting suggests a setup. Through hindsightand the revelations made by such figures as Lucky Luciano and Doc Stacher that the police were tipped off and the meeting sabotagedit became almost impossible to reject insider foul play.
If Genovese thought he was going to call a meeting of the syndicateand it wasn't merely a Mafia conference, since among those invited (but not attending) were Meyer Lansky and Doc Stacherand simply rearrange affairs to suit himself he would be, and was, rudely disillusioned.
Newspaper speculation suggested that the Apalachin meeting was intended as a forum for presenting Genovese with his "boss of bosses" crown. Much was also made of the fact that a total of $300,000 was found on the arrested crime bosses; "envelope money" perhaps to be given to Genovese? More likely the money was a total of typical fat wads carried by dons. And Carlo

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