The Mob and the City (34 page)

FBI officials under Hoover have since come forward to talk about the director's blind spot regarding the Mafia. “‘They're just a bunch of hoodlums,’ Hoover would say. He didn't want to tackle organized crime,” confirms William Sullivan, former third-in-command of the FBI.
⁷⁵
Or as former assistant FBI director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach explained:

His profound contempt for the criminal mind, combined with his enormous faith in the agency he had created, persuaded him that no such complex national criminal organization could exist without him knowing about it. He didn't know it; ergo it did not exist.
⁷⁶

FBI official Oliver “Buck” Revell recalled an extraordinary conversation that he'd had with Director Hoover on February 8, 1971. Hoover was welcoming Revell to his role heading up a new FBI assault on the Cosa Nostra. After some pleasantries, Hoover became reflective on his disbelief in the Mafia's existence. “We didn't have any evidence,” Hoover insisted. “Not until they held that hoodlum conference up in Apalachin, New York, back in ’57.”
⁷⁷

These accounts can now be corroborated by the written words of Hoover himself. On December 30, 1970, Hoover sent an interoffice memorandum to his deputies asking them to read Ed Reid's 1969 book on the mob,
The Grim Reapers
.
⁷⁸
Hoover handwrote a revealing note at the bottom. The document reads:

December 30, 1970

Copies of the GRIM REAPERS have been sent to Mr. Gale and Mr. Rosen, with the message that Mr. Hoover wishes them to read it.

hwg [Secretary Gandy].

I have in mind that I was originally advised by Rosen that the Mafia or anything like it in character never existed in this country. I have been plagued ever since for having denied its existence. H
⁷⁹

The “Rosen” to which the director referred in his note was Alex Rosen, assistant director of the General Investigative Division for thirty years under Hoover.
⁸⁰
Although Hoover may have been blaming Rosen unfairly, the note gives us a rare glimpse into Hoover's thinking on the Mafia. At some point, Hoover believed that “the Mafia or anything like it in character never existed in this country,” and he therefore “denied its existence.” He regretted his stance, feeling “plagued ever since” for his longstanding position.

Still, how could Hoover have doubted the existence of the Mafia for so long? The Federal Bureau of
Investigation
should have investigated stories corroborating the existence of the Mafia far more seriously. “It's inexcusable for them to say they couldn't have been using that [intelligence] function to at least be aware of what the hell is going on,” said William Hundley, a top lawyer in the Justice Department.
⁸¹
Nor is it satisfactory to blame Senator Kefauver's flawed hearings, as some have suggested, for the FBI director's refusal to acknowledge the Mafia. It is preposterous to expect Senate staff to prove a crime syndicate to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Had Hoover used
some of the FBI's intelligence function to investigate the Mafia, it might have supplied the Kefauver Committee with the sources it needed. At a minimum, Hoover could have given more informative responses. Take the fine answer of a Bureau of Narcotics agent in 1957 to a Kefauver-inspired question about an international “head of the Mafia”:

8–1: Handwritten note of J. Edgar Hoover, 1971. (Courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation)

Or take J. Edgar Hoover's own later description in January 1962: “No single individual or coalition of racketeers dominates organized crime across the nation. There are, however, loose connections among controlling groups in various areas through family ties, mutual interest, and financial investment.”
⁸³
Or in September 1963, when Hoover explained that the Cosa Nostra was “a strong arm of organized crime in America” but that there was other organized crime, too.
⁸⁴

In fairness to Hoover, doubting the Cosa Nostra's existence was not a lunatic position in the 1950s. Before the Apalachin meeting and mob soldier Joe Valachi's public testimony of 1963, before the later flood of Mafia prosecutions (and even after), many people doubted the existence of the Mafia. “Regardless of what anyone else may say on the subject, there is no Sicilian Mafia, or simply ‘Mafia’ in the United States,” declared the historian Giovanni Schiavo on November 16, 1957, days after the Apalachin meeting.
⁸⁵
When FBI witness Joe Valachi testified before a Senate committee in 1963, he was attacked and belittled not only by fellow
mafiosi
, but by criminologists as well. In a 1969 essay titled “God and the Mafia,” the criminologist Gordon Hawkins mocked Valachi's testimony, claiming that evidence of the Mafia is “on examination to consist of little more than a series of dogmatic assertions.”
⁸⁶
But Valachi was a legitimate
mafioso
whose testimony was mostly right, and the esteemed criminologist was mostly wrong. Indeed, Valachi's testimony had already been thoroughly corroborated by multiple sources by 1969.
⁸⁷
Simply put, Mafia skeptics could not (or would not) accept that there were secret alliances of “families” dedicated to lives of crime and bound by common rituals and practices that operated in the United States.

But enough about Hoover. Let us look at the events in the Mafia that changed his mind: the events of 1957, the mob's terrible year.

The Volcano.

—Joe Bonanno on New York in the 1950s,
A Man of Honor
(1983)

They had been hunting Frank Costello at night. On the evening of Tuesday, April 30, 1957, Costello, the boss of the Luciano Family, was out on the town with his pals Anthony “Little Augie Pisano” Carfano and Frank Erickson. That same night, a police detective was conducting surveillance at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in an unrelated matter when he recognized Costello walking into the hotel bar.

The detective then spotted something else: two other men were surreptitiously trailing Costello's party. The lawman decided to keep an eye on them. When Costello left the Waldorf Astoria to stroll around midtown Manhattan, the two suspicious men were following him again from a distance. The police detective did not have enough to go on though, so he filed the observation away in his memory. Within days, the detective would learn the full implications of what he had seen.
¹

In the spring of 1957, the New York Mafia was fat, prosperous, and growing. The Mafia families controlled key union officials and held influence over businessmen in major industries. They were the top crime syndicates in Gotham, and they were the dominant heroin traffickers in America.

By Thanksgiving 1957, the Cosa Nostra would be in disarray. Internal conflicts would erupt into the public at a level unseen since 1931. Two Mafia bosses would be violently deposed, an underboss murdered while grocery shopping, and the wiseguys exposed to new scrutiny. Nineteen fifty-seven was to be the mob's
annus horribilis
.

Drawing on previously unpublished sources, this chapter re-creates the Mafia assassinations of 1957 and explores the underlying causes of the conflict. The unraveling of the mob leadership in the fifties revealed flaws present since the origins of the modern Mafia.

THE HUNTING OF A MOB BOSS: FRANK COSTELLO AND VITO GENOVESE

The men hunting Frank Costello were sent by his own underboss, Vito Genovese. He was a treacherous man to have as an underboss. He had little hesitation about arranging the deaths of
mafiosi
he had known for decades. Genovese soldier Joe Valachi testified before Congress that he executed hits on Steve Franse and Eugene Giannini on the direct orders of Vito Genovese. Genovese tried justifying his role in the 1951 murder of Willie Moretti, the longtime underboss of the Luciano Family, who the Commission thought was talking too openly about the Mafia. “It was supposedly a mercy killing because he was sick,” Valachi recounted. “Genovese told me ‘The Lord have mercy on his soul, he's losing his mind.’”
²

Vito Genovese could make deals with anyone—and then promptly double-cross them. Take Genovese's machinations with Fascist Italy during the Second World War. Genovese plied Fascist officials with enormous cash tributes amounting to $250,000. He even received a personal decoration from the dictator Benito Mussolini. After the Axis powers fell, Genovese weaseled his way into the confidences of the United States Army occupation authorities. He promptly betrayed their trust by becoming a black marketeer of diverted American gasoline supplies.
³

Because of Genovese's ruthlessness, stories arose whenever people died around him. For example, rumors swirled when Genovese married Anna Vernotico on March 30, 1932, only two weeks after her first husband Gerard Vernotico was found murdered. “Associates believed Vito had her husband strangled to death so that he could marry her,” writes Selwyn Raab in his book
Five Families
. Left out of the story is that a New York court had already granted
Anna's petition for a divorce in January 1932, which was due to become a final judgment ninety days later in April 1932. Genovese would have been risking a murder charge to save a few weeks. In fact, Genovese was not a suspect in the case. Rather, the police believed that Gerard Vernotico, a gangster with a lengthy record, was killed by other racketeers.
⁴

Genovese has also been blamed for the death of Pete LaTempa, a witness in the homicide case against Genovese for the 1934 murder of Ferdinand Boccia. LaTempa died from a drug overdose while in protective custody on January 15, 1945. “The city medical examiner reported that the pills LaTempa swallowed were not the prescribed drugs and contained enough poison to ‘kill eight horses,’” asserts Raab. This is not accurate. The toxicology report found prescription barbiturates in his system. Investigators discovered that LaTempa had received a prescription (from a doctor with the district attorney's office) for Seconal—a barbiturate. Moreover, LaTempa had previously attempted suicide by hanging on December 6, 1944. Based on this evidence, the district attorney ruled LaTempa's death a suicide. In short, Vito Genovese's record is sordid enough without repeating demonstrably inaccurate stories.
⁵

Vito Genovese moved on Costello in the spring of 1957 after sensing the boss's vulnerability. The sixty-six-year-old Frank Costello had grown tired of the mob's street operations. Costello once boasted of knowing “the better people and nothing but the better. I know some of the biggest utility men, some of the biggest businessmen in the country.”
⁶
The “better people” apparently did not include the
caporegimes
in his mob syndicate, with whom Costello had weak relations.
⁷