The Everything Mafia Book (30 page)

Corsican mobsters have been implicated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Jailhouse confessions from a Corsican gangster fingered Lucien Sarti as one of the gunmen. The theory has been dismissed, but the involvement of Corsican mobsters is an intriguing possibility.

The Corsican mob lacked the elaborate organization of the rest of the Mafia. It was comprised of close-knit and insular clans who worked together for the greater evil. They have always had a track record of working for the highest bidder and have occasionally been employed by the Americans. It is generally accepted that the CIA paid the Corsican mob to break the striking communist labor unions. The Corsican mob’s association with the CIA made them an extremely powerful crime family and in effect made Marseilles the largest heroin producer in the Western world.

The Mafia’s involvement in the drug trade has diminished, but other groups are picking up the slack. Some of them are funneling drug money into terrorist networks. These new transnational Mafias pose a serious threat to national security.

Popeye

The movie
The French Connection
followed New York City cop Eddie “Popeye” Doyle and his partner Sonny Grasso as they attempted to unravel the French mob’s heroin racket. The case began when they noticed a Bonanno family member tossing money all over the place at a bar. The tenacious detectives set out a stakeout at the mobster’s place of business and soon uncovered a heroin ring. Though nowhere near as exciting as the famous car chase through Brooklyn featured in the movie, the case was a test for the detectives as they matched wits against the Mafia and French traffickers. In the end the mobsters lost, though the disruption of the Connection was temporary at best.

Loss of Control

By the late 1970s the FBI, DEA, and various local and state law enforcement agencies had made some serious inroads into the Mafia’s drug network. Another development was the rise in popularity of cocaine, a drug that was provided to countless partiers by the Colombian and Cuban crime groups. The Mafia was slow to get onboard with the cocaine trade, instead clinging on to heroin. As the law was pressuring the Mafia from one side, other crime groups were coming in from the other. Even homegrown Mafia groups from the inner city were starting to stand up to the Mafia.

Passage to Bangkok

The inner cities of America had always been under the grasp of the Mafia. They preyed on the inhabitants, often black. But starting in the 1960s, up and coming black crime groups started standing up to the Mafia and moving drugs on their own without having to buy them for inflated prices from their mobbed-up suppliers. Gang boss Frank Lucas took things one step further—he went to the source.

Frank Lucas was the subject of the 2007 movie American Gangster. In the movie Denzel Washington played the flamboyant drug kingpin. Though some law enforcement officers complained their roles in the demise of Lucas’s reign were trivialized, Lucas helped with the movie to try to keep it somewhat accurate.

The Golden Triangle was an area of Southeast Asia that became the new source for much of the heroin that had previously gone through the French Connection. Lucas set up his own distribution network to bypass the mob and bring the profit to his gang. Others emulated his model for a short time, until the heroin trade was taken over by Chinese organized crime groups.

The Purple Gang was the name of a famous bootlegging syndicate. It was also the name of a group of Mafia drug dealers that operated out of East Harlem in the 1970s. Also known as the Pleasant Avenue Connection, they represented a cross-section of the New York five families as well as sellers from various other crime organizations.

Dumbed-Down Dons

Back on the United States home front, the Mafia adapted to the times, and the drug trade became more and more a part of Mafia business and more and more in the open. The Mafia’s pretense of civility and its vaunted code of honor gave way to the inherent greed of its members. The Mafia went from avoiding involvement in narcotics to involvement with reservations to outright and enthusiastic drug trafficking. As the old dons died and the Young Turks took over, they were less concerned about the nasty nature of the drug trade and more interested in the profits they made.

The Mafia went from wholesalers and controllers of routes to low-level street salesman, peddling bags of coke and joints in their own neighborhoods. This embarrassing downgrading of their power in the drug world led to numerous busts from both the cops and feds, not to mention an exponential increase in the number of wise guys ready to testify against their former cohorts in crime.

CHAPTER 15
The Gotti Mystique

The last of the flashy and flamboyant Mafia dons was John Gotti. In 1985, he became the boss of the Gam-bino crime family. He was the first hoodlum since Al Capone to become a media darling. Like Capone, he contributed undeserved positive publicity and bogus charm to a nasty and brutish lifestyle. Although his reign lasted only seven years, he was on the cover of
Time
, a favorite target of the New York City media, and a celebrity in his own right. This notoriety ultimately led to his downfall, and the fall of a number of his capos.

Coming Up in the World

The glory days of the Mafia were long gone by the 1980s. The FBI was using wiretaps, turncoats, and the latest technology to battle organized crime. Unlike the Hoover years, the FBI considered the Mafia to be one of their top priorities. While most of the new dons were content to lay low and out of the limelight, Gotti thrust himself in front of a camera whenever he got the chance. John Joseph Gotti Jr. was born in the Bronx in 1940. He came from a poor family. His family moved to Brooklyn, and the angry young kid found himself in the land of the wise guys. They became his heroes. Like Al Capone a few decades earlier, he began his life in crime running errands for the local mobsters.

He became the member of a criminal street gang. Gotti was no “Fonzie,” however. The gang was involved in car theft, robbery, and other criminal activity. He was arrested five times while still a teenager but avoided any jail time, a bit of luck that would follow him through most of his career. His luck did run out eventually.

It is not always easy when you are “married to the mob.” The Gotti marriage was a tumultuous one. The hundreds of hours of FBI wiretaps reveal John Gotti complaining, “That woman is driving me crazy,” referring to his wife.

Married to the Mob

John Gotti married Victoria DiGiorgio in 1962. His marriage was volatile, full of separations both by mutual consent and imposed by trips “up the river.” After a brief flirtation with the legitimate world he quickly returned to a life of crime. The couple had five children. One would die tragically young, and another, Victoria, became a successful author, fundraiser for charities, reality TV show star, and tabloid fodder. His namesake, John Gotti Jr., ascended to the boss of the family briefly in the 1990s, but the FBI were hot on his tail. After serving a sentence for racketeering he beat three other indictments. He was arrested yet again and indicted in Tampa, Florida, in 2008 for overseeing a crew into robbery, drug dealing, and murder.

The Ozone Layer

Gotti hooked up with the Gambino crime family when he joined a group of low-level hoods that reported to Aniello Dellacroce, who hung out at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, a storefront in Ozone Park, Queens. Gotti’s beat was nearby John F. Kennedy International Airport. The pack of thieves hijacked stuff that landed at the airport and had yet to make it to its final destination. Gotti and his crew would steal anything; one of their favorite things to steal was women’s designer clothing. In 1968 Gotti was nabbed in the back of one of his heist trucks by the FBI and went to jail for three years.

Got any John Gotti memorabilia? It might be worth more than you think. A person who attended Gotti’s wake and grabbed a memorial card from the funeral home sold it on eBay for over $300. A newspaper from the day he died, the Time magazine with his picture on the cover, and various items he supposedly owned have all been sold for good money online.