Joe Bruno's Mobsters - Six Volume Set (18 page)

So Torrio handed over all his operations to Capone, saying “It's all yours, Al. I'm retiring.”

Torrio absconded with his wife to live in Italy for a few years, but then he returned to America. Back on his home turf, Torrio became a mentor to such notables as Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, both of whom came to Torrio many times for advice.

In 1973, while sitting in a barber's chair in Brooklyn, Johnny Torrio died of a heart attack at the age of 75. Torrio died facing the door, his eyes wide-open, ever cautious to the very end.

T
riangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

If it weren't for the greed of the sweatshop bosses, this tragedy may never have occurred. However, on March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire took the lives of 141 people, most of them women.

At the turn of the 20
th
century, working conditions in the New York City sweatshops were abysmal. Men, woman, and children toiled in dirty factories, warehouses, and tenements, doing menial tasks, that made the garment industry one of the most profitable businesses in the nation. Labor laws were inadequate and hardly ever enforced. Factory inspections were rare, and if they were done at all, the factory owners knew whose palms to grease to get high inspection marks, when the condemnation of their factory was the proper course of action.

In 1899, a law banning night work for women was declared unconstitutional. The absurd reason given by the courts, whose members were often in the sweatshop bosses' back pockets, was that the law “deprived woman of the liberty to work in factories at night, or for as long as they wished to.” In 1907, this ruling was upheld by the New York Court of Appeals. Even though the International Ladies Garment Workers Union was formed in 1900, the sweatshop bosses hired thugs as strikebreakers, to keep the ladies' union in line, by force if necessary.

Of all the greedy sweatshop owners, the worst offenders were Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, who owned the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, located on the 8
th
, 9
th
, and 10
th
floors of  the 10-story Asch Building at 22 Washington Place, on the corner of  Greene Street. The factory produced women's blouses, known at the time as “shirtwaists.” The firm employed around 500-600  people, most of whom were young female Jewish and Italian immigrants, who worked under horrible conditions, for 9 hours a day on weekdays, and 7 hours on Saturdays. The bosses were such tyrants, they charged their employees for needles and for other supplies. They also charged them a fee for using their chairs, and if one of the employees damaged a piece of goods, they had to pay three times the value of the item to replace it.

In 1908, Blanck and Harris formed a sham company union that served their purposes much better than it served their hundreds of employees. Several employees, who tried to join a legitimate union, like the International Ladies Garment Workers Union or the United Hebrew Trades, were quickly fired. The reason management gave for these firings was that because of poor economic conditions, they had to cut staff. Yet strangely enough, new workers were hired
almost immediately after the dismissal of the others.

Because Triangle Shirtwaist Company had locked out their dismissed workers, Local 25 of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union called for a strike against them. Blanck and Harris hired union strike breakers, or “schlammers,” to beat up the male pickets. They also hired prostitutes to mingle with the female workers in the picket lines, in order to cause disruptions. The police and the judges, obviously working at the behest of the owners, sided with Blanck and Harris. One judge even said at the sentencing of one picketer, “You are on strike against God.”

On March 25, 1911, it was a cold and windy day. As the 5p.m. closing time approached, it was estimated that 600 employees, packed in like sardines, were working at the sewing machine at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Most were women between the ages of 13 and 23. The 5p.m. bell rang, and the women scrambled to get their coats and hats, and then they rushed for the elevators.

Suddenly, a fire broke out on the southeast corner of the 8
th
floor. It was later determined that the fire was inadvertently caused by a cigarette butt that had been thrown into a litter basket, near a sewing machine. An updraft of air sent the flames and smoke shooting upwards towards the roof.

The building had no sprinkler system, and the fire quickly enveloped the entire 8
th,
9
th,
and 10
th
floors. Girls on the 8
th
floor ran to a stairwell on the Washington Place side of the building, but the door was locked from the outside. The fire was so intense, all the windows on the top three floors of the building blew out from the heat.

Some workers were able to jam themselves into the elevators, while the elevators were still working. Others, including Blanck and Harris, were saved because they were able to make it to the safety of the roof.

A passerby named Joe Zito, and an elevator operator named Gaspar Mortillalo, used the only working elevator to make five trips up to the 9
th
floor; taking down 25-30 terrified people at a time. However, that elevator soon became inoperable too.

Within five minutes, the fire trucks had arrived, but there was not much they could do. Their extension ladders only reached the 6
th
floor and the stream from their hoses only reached the 7
th
floor. Rather than burn to death, people began jumping out of the windows, sometimes in groups of two, three, and four.

A man and a woman appeared in a 9
th
floor window, their clothes ablaze. They kissed, then hugged, and jumped together, their bodies smashing on the cold pavement below.

The firemen brought out safety nets to catch the jumpers, but it was hopeless.

One fire chief later said, “Life nets? What good were life nets? The little ones went right through the life nets, and the pavement too. Nobody could hold a life net when those girls from the ninth floor came down.”

The fire only lasted 10 minutes, but when it was over, 141 workers had died; 125 were women.

Nine months after the fire, Blanck and Harris were put on trial on manslaughter charges. However, the trial, like the earlier building inspections, was a farce. The judge was Thomas Crain, a Tammany Hall appointee, and he had little interest in justice for the dead workers. Judge Crain manipulated a trial where only an acquittal was possible. It took the jury just 100 minutes to render a verdict of not-guilty.

This did not go down too well with the victim's families. The day after the not-guilty verdicts, hundreds of despondent victim's relatives stood outside the Tombs Courthouse. Blanck and Harris, surrounded by five police officers, tried to slither out of the building through the
Leonard Street exit. When the two men were spotted, they were quickly enveloped by an angry crowd.

David Weiner, whose sister had died in the fire, charged at the sweatshop bosses, swinging his fist in the air.

“Not Guilty? Not Guilty?” Weiner screamed. “It was murder! Murder!”

Weiner quickly was subdued by the police, but he was so distraught, he fainted and had to be rushed to the hospital.

In 1913, the victim's families  won a lawsuit against Blanck and Harris. The families were awarded a measly $75 per victim, whereas Blanck and Harris were paid by the insurance company $60,000 more than the total reported loss of life and property. Ironically, in late 1913, Blanck was arrested again, for locking the doors to his sweatshop.

The tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire did not go for naught.

The New York State Legislature - whose members included  future Presidential candidate Al Smith, and Robert Wagner, the father of the future Mayor of New York City by the same name - forced the state to completely rewrite its labor laws. The State Legislature created the New York State Factory Investigating Committee, to "investigate factory conditions in this and other cities, and to report remedial measures of legislation to prevent hazard, or loss of life, among employees through fire, insanitary conditions, and occupational diseases."

As a direct result of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, The American Society of Safety Engineers was founded on October 14, 1911.

T
weed, William (Boss)

William “Boss” Tweed, head crook at Tammany Hall, stole so much money from the New York City coffers, by 1870 Tweed had become the third largest land owner in the entire city.

Tweed, a third generation Scottish-Irishman, was born on April 3, 1823, at 24 Cherry Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His father was a chair maker, and the young Tweed tried to follow in his father's footsteps, but the lure of the streets became too much for Tweed to overcome. Tweed ran with a motley crew of juvenile delinquents called the “Cherry Street Gang,” who wreaked havoc on local merchants by stealing their wares and selling them on the street's black market.

Soon, Tweed became boss of the “Cherry Hill Gang,” and he (as did most gang members of that era) joined various volunteer fire companies, which were a springboard for men with political ambitions. Tweed helped found American Fire Engine Company No. 6, which was called the “Big Six.” During his time in the volunteer fire business, Tweed forged friendships with people of all ancestries: Irish, Scottish, Germans - anyone who could help him climb the ladder of public service, with only one thing in mind, steal big and steal often.

In 1850, Tweed ran unsuccessfully for assistant alderman on the Democratic ticket. However, a year later Tweed was elected alderman, a non-paying job, but with unlimited power for anyone smart enough, and crooked enough, to take advantage of its perks. Just scant weeks after he became an alderman, Tweed brokered a deal to buy land on Wards Island for a new potter’s field. The asking price was $30,000, but Tweed paid $103,450 of the city's money for the land, then split the difference between  himself and several other civic-minded officials.

In 1855, Tweed was elected to the New York City Board of Elections, which was another cash cow for the money-hungry Tweed. He sold city textbooks for his own profit, and he sold teachers' jobs to whomever had the money to buy one. In one instance, Tweed peddled a
teachers’ position to a crippled schoolmarm for $75, even though the job only paid $300 a year.

In 1857, Tweed was appointed to the New York County Board of Supervisors, which propelled Tweed into a much more profitable form of thievery. Tweed formed what was known as the “Tweed Ring,” which was nothing more than Tweed and his buddies controlling every job and work permit in the entire city of New York. Every contractor, artisan, and merchant who wanted to do business with the city had to cough up the cash, and they coughed up plenty. It is estimated that Tweed's Board of Supervisors pocketed 15 percent of every dollar spent on construction in New York City.

Concerning Tweed and his cronies, American lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong wrote in 1860, “Our city government is rotten to the core.”

By 1865, Tweed's wealth had grown to impressive proportions and so did his girth. Standing 5-feet-11-inches, Tweed's weight ballooned to 320 pounds. His reputation for eating was legendary, and he consumed enormous amounts of the finest foods in the finest restaurants. Tweed floundered around town, like a whale out of water, with a huge diamond stuck right in the middle of his fancy shirt, flouting his tremendous wealth.

It is estimated, from 1865 to 1871, Tweed's gang stole as much as $200 million from the New York City Treasury. They did this by over-billing the city for everything imaginable. They paid out of the city's coffers $10,000 for $75 worth of pencils, $171,000 for $4,000 worth of tables and chairs, and $1,826,000 for the plastering of a municipal building, which actually cost only $50,000 to plaster. Tweed also gave citizenship to over 60,000 immigrants, none of whom could read or write, but who could vote for Tweed and his cohorts on election day.

Tweed's downfall began on December 25, 1869, when
Harper's Weekly
published a cartoon of Tweed and his gang breaking into a huge box, with the caption “Taxpayers' and Tenants' Hard Earned Cash.”

Upon seeing the cartoon, Tweed said, “Stop them damned pictures. I don't care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures!"

With the pressure mounting to unveil the extent of  Tweed's corruption, a blue ribbon panel, headed by future Presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden, was formed to investigate New York City's financial documents. When the books were checked, it was discovered that money had gone directly from city contractors into Tweed's pocket. The next day, Boss Tweed was arrested.

His first trial, in January 1873, ended in a hung jury; a jury many people thought was bought with Tweed's money. However, in November of that same year, Tweed was convicted on 204 out of 220 counts and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Tweed was incarcerated in the Ludlow Street Jail, but, for some unknown reason, he was allowed home visits. During one such visit, Tweed fled the country and traveled to Spain, where he worked as a seaman on a commercial ship. Because his picture had been seen frequently in the newspapers, Tweed was recognized and returned to America. Tweed again was imprisoned in the Ludlow Street Jail, but this time no home visits were allowed.