Reclaiming History (262 page)

One of the two principal groups (the other being the CIA)
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whom conspiracy theorists have accused of being behind the assassination is organized crime, popularly referred to as the Mafia or Cosa Nostra, loosely translated as “Our Thing.” Most organized-crime scholars considered the word
Mafia
†
as referring to Italian members of major organized-crime “families” in America whose ancestors came from Italy. In the beginning, having only one Italian parent was not enough for membership in the Mafia. Also, it has been written that if a person (or his parents) didn’t come from the specific Italian island or region of Sicily, he could do business and break bread with the Mafia, but he couldn’t become a member, and the ancestry of all Mafia members in the early years was Sicilian. Mafia don Joseph Masseria, himself from Sicily, first opened the doors of the American Mafia to non-Sicilian Italians in 1919, though only at the lower level. Thereafter, many came from other regions, particularly the adjacent southern region of Calabria. And years later, even the Masseria limitation was erased, perhaps the most prominent examples being Vito Genovese, who in the 1950s was the boss of one of New York’s biggest Mafia families and who came from a village near Naples in the southern region of Campania, where the Mafia is called Camorra, and Frank Costello (Francesco Castiglia), one of the most powerful mafioso ever, and a rival of Genovese’s, who came from a small village in Calabria.
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But in the early years, no Mafia don could have roots anywhere other than Sicily. Indeed, the biggest and most powerful Italian mobster of all, even exceeding Charles “Lucky” Luciano, was Chicago’s Al (short for Alphonse) Capone, who ruled Chicago in the 1920s like no other gangster ever ruled any American city. Capone was helped by the estimated $15 million in payoffs he made annually to city and state officials, including the Chicago Police Department, for protection. “Scarface Al,” who once noted, “You can go further with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone,” was born in Brooklyn of parents who immigrated from Naples, not the island of Sicily, and he always wanted to be a Mafia boss. But as mob historian Frederic Sondern has written, “He couldn’t because he was a Neapolitan.” The irony is that Capone was so big he could designate who the Mafia boss would be in Chicago (e.g., Antonio Lombardo), but couldn’t (at least in those days) be that person himself.
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Today, the only requirement is that a Mafia member be Italian.
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However, many non-Italians throughout the years, mostly Jewish (e.g., Meyer Lansky, Jacob “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Arthur “Dutch Shultz” Flegenheimer, Moe Dalitz, Jake Shapiro, Longy Zwillman, and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel), became very close “criminal associates” of Mafia families with considerable power. Writing in 1969, mob authority Ralph Salerno said that “a man like Meyer Lansky [the mob’s financial wizard, true name Maier Suchowljansky] is the equal of any family boss, and the superior of some.”
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The FBI refers to the Mafia as La Cosa Nostra.
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“It’s not Mafia,” mob informant Joe Valachi told FBI agent James J. Flynn, who had gained Valachi’s confidence by friendly visits with him behind bars, in September of 1962. “That’s the expression the outsider uses…It’s Cosa Nostra.”
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Chicago mob members, however, refer to themselves as the Outfit or Syndicate,
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and Lucky Luciano’s biographer, writing in 1975, said Valachi was only referring to what the “Italian-American syndicate in the New York area” called itself. And even within the New York mob families, Sciacca quotes Luciano in the late 1950s telling a federal narcotics undercover agent, “I’ll tell you something, kid. There’s always been a Mafia, but it’s not like those sons-a-bitches tell it in the newspapers…The Mafia’s like any other organization, except we don’t go in for advertising. We’re big business, is all.”
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In any event, because
Mafia
, not
Cosa Nostra
, is the much more well-known term, I shall refer mostly to organized crime in this book as the Mafia, organized crime, or the mob.

We also learned from Valachi, for the first time, the initiation rites for the Mafia. With a gun and a knife on top of a table at which are seated many Mafia members, the initiate is told, “This represents that you live by the gun and the knife and you die by the gun and the knife.” The initiate extends the finger he shoots with, and the end of it is pricked with a pin and squeezed until the blood comes out. He is told that “this blood means that we are now one Family.” The initiate is instructed to cup his hands. A piece of paper is put inside and lit with a match, the initiate being told to say, all in Italian, “This is the way I will burn if I betray the secret of this Cosa Nostra.” Referring to
omerta
, the vow of silence—never to “rat on” any member or any of the brotherhood’s activities—Valachi, who went through the rite when he joined the Mafia in 1930, said the initiate is told, “Here are the two most important things you have to remember. Drill them into your head. The first is that to betray the secret of Cosa Nostra means death without trial. Second, to violate any member’s wife means death without trial.”
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It was believed that in the early years of the Mafia, an aspiring member of a mob family had to take part in at least one murder before he was accepted. But as long ago as 1967, one graying mafioso complained to a reporter for
Life
magazine, “Today, you got a thousand guys in here that never broke an egg.”
¹⁰

Today, because of endless federal prosecutions and members who found it to their clear advantage to break the vow of silence, organized crime is a shell of its former self. But in its heyday, in the 1920s through most of the 1960s, there were twenty-four, semi-independent “families” in charge of certain criminal activity in their respective geographical areas in the United States,
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and the collective families were reported, in 1967, to be grossing around $40 billion a year from their illegal activities, far more than any major American corporation such as General Motors or U.S. Steel.
¹¹
Lansky himself acknowledged that the vast conglomerate of criminal enterprises he oversaw financially was “bigger than U.S. Steel.”
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In New York, the mob, among its many other activities, controlled the port (the nation’s largest) as well as the city’s garment industry (which produced most of America’s clothing).
¹³
Indeed, for years the mob had a grip on Las Vegas gambling casinos, and in the 1930s made substantial but ultimately unsuccessful inroads into taking over Detroit’s auto industry and the big screen in Hollywood.

The American Mafia’s power and wealth has always been hidden, peripheral, and surreptitious. Not so with its Sicilian ancestors. “By the beginning of the nineteenth century,” Italian author Michele Pantaleone writes, the Sicilian Mafia “was already a criminal organization interwoven into the country’s political and economic life…More efficient than the police, [it] penetrated deeply into all aspects of the town’s life.” Indeed, the Mafia’s reach was so extensive that in many Sicilian villages even disputes involving crimes among nonmembers would be mediated, for a fee from both parties, by a mafioso, and “no one dared to call in the police when there was Mafia intervention.” When Don Calogero Vizzini, the leader of the Sicilian Mafia, died of natural causes in 1954, “his funeral was…attended by many local and provincial authorities and politicians…For eight days the municipal and Christian Democrat offices were closed, and black crepe banners hung from the windows.”
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The only American mobster who even remotely approached this type of acceptance in the community was, of course, Capone in Chicago. During Prohibition, when he was providing alcoholic beverages to a citizenry with unhappily parched palates, he was cheered at Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park, and for at least one local election, the city fathers sent an emissary to Capone at his fortress-like headquarters on the top three floors of Chicago’s downtown Lexington Hotel to ask him if they could have a free election without the corrupting influence and muscle of his organization. Mob historian Frederic Sondern writes that when Capone returned to Chicago in March of 1930 after serving ten months in Pennsylvania for carrying a concealed weapon, “he was welcomed home like returning royalty by cheering crowds and many of Chicago’s principal officials.”
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Although the American Mafia continues to decline, the Sicilian Mafia, though not as violent as it once was, is flourishing and has literally been accepted by the Italian authorities as a fact of life. This was no more demonstrated than when Pietro Lunardi, the minister of infrastructure for Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said in 2001 that the Mafia was a reality that “we have to live with.” As indicated, the Sicilian Mafia, from its origins, had always been a part of the social and economic fabric of Sicily. But what caused it to temper its violence in recent years was the rage by all of Italy against it when it blew up the car driving the crusading anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone from a Palermo airport in 1992, killing Falcone, his wife, and three police bodyguards. Two months later, Falcone’s associate and the chief prosecutor in Palermo, Paolo Borsellino, was murdered by a car bomb, along with five bodyguards, as he arrived for a visit with his mother outside her apartment building. The crackdown by an enraged nation culminated in the arrest the following year of Salvatore “The Beast” Riina, the Sicilian boss of bosses. His successor, Bernardo “The Tractor” Provenzano, made a wise decision to cut down on the violence against non-mafioso citizens and public figures, but after more than forty years on the run, thirteen of which he was the boss of bosses, in 2006 Provenzano finally ran out of luck. On April 11, he was arrested in his then hideout, a dilapidated farmhouse in the countryside outside the Sicilian town of Corleone. Law enforcement and Mafia experts believe that Provenzano’s arrest was not a crippling blow to the still powerful and well-organized Sicilian mob.
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Speaking of Corleone, no Mafia clan was more violent than the one in Corleone, the mountain town south of Palermo that was immortalized in the 1969
Godfather
movie when writer Mario Puzo gave the town’s name to his “godfather”
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(Don Vito Corleone, played by Marlon Brando), where judges, police officers, recalcitrant politicians, and fellow mafiosi were routinely murdered. But today, though the Mafia’s grip on Sicilian economic life is still strong, fear of the Mafia by non-mafiosi is nowhere near what it once was, including in Corleone, per Antonio Iannago, the town’s deputy mayor.

According to Eurispes, an Italian think tank in Rome, the Italian Mafia, mostly concentrated in Sicily but existing throughout the country, took in profits of about $123 billion in 2004, approximately 10 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product, mostly from drug trafficking, protection money, and corruption payoffs in big business, construction deals, and public works projects. With respect to protection money, it is estimated that 80 percent of Palermo’s merchants pay protection money, known as the
pizzo
, more than ever before, but in smaller amounts. The slogan is
Pagare tutti, pagare meno
, meaning “everyone pays less, but everyone pays.” And no merchant reports the payoffs to the police. “The Mafia doesn’t even need to threaten anymore. People look to the Mafia and seek it out for favors,” says Enrico Bellavia, a Sicilian journalist and author. Bellavia says the situation has evolved to the point where people in Sicily don’t even ask themselves whether the Mafia is a bad organization. They just see it as a staple in their lives—indeed, “a force that can [often] resolve their individual needs.”
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T
he first Mafia family in America was founded in 1875 in New Orleans by a group of Sicilian immigrants. Mafia author Thomas Reppetto writes that “the largest city in the South was a natural destination for Italians. New Orleans had been a terminus for Italian fruit ships since before the Civil War, and descriptions of the city had been carried back to the mother country by sailors and merchants who, by and large, preferred its climate to the colder and less predictable weather of Boston or New York.”
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In the early years in America, most mafiosi committed small crimes against each other. As one, perhaps apocryphal, story tells it, when the son of one such immigrant was told that his father had victimized his own fellow Italian immigrants, his response is said to have been, “Well, of course, it had to have been that way. My father didn’t know how to say stick ’em up in English. Who else could he rob?” But soon the Mafia, or “Black Hand,” as it was sometimes called in the early years because Mafia extortionists would leave the imprint of a black hand on their warnings, branched out from small crimes in the “Little Italy” sections of cities like New York and Chicago into major crime—mostly gambling, extortion, bootlegging, labor racketeering, and narcotics
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—all over the nation. That has been its business since then. This business has only been successful, however, because of murder and the threat of it.

Ironically, it was the religious and social conservatives, helped by fire-and-brimstone preachers like the colorful evangelist Billy Sunday, who launched organized crime in America and its biggest local gangster ever, Capone, into the really big time and filled its coffers as never before.
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Their temperance movement led to the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 (it went into effect in 1920), which prohibited “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” in the United States. Prohibition, the effort to dry up America, was wildly unpopular, and the imbibing of alcohol, which knew (and still knows) no sociological or economic boundaries, demanded a solution. The Mafia came to the rescue by its illicit and highly priced sale of alcohol to thirsty Americans throughout the land. An inevitable concomitant to the circumvention of the Volstead Act (which implemented the Eighteenth Amendment and extended Prohibition by making it unlawful to “possess or use” alcohol) was the corruption of those who were supposed to enforce the ill-advised law. With payoffs to the police, West Fifty-second Street in New York, for instance, “was an almost unbroken row of speakeasies” that openly sold alcohol.
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The abysmal failure of the social experiment was memorialized by the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933, which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment.