The Violent Years (6 page)

On the morning of October 13, 1928, Joseph Tallman was shot to death as he was driving in Detroit. The car in which Tallman and two companions were riding was suddenly forced to the curb by another vehicle in which three gunmen opened fire on Tallman. Tallman’s two associates, Harvey Smith and Max Wuester, told police that they had just left a saloon at Third and Selden and were driving south on Fourth Street when the incident occurred. More than 13 shots had been fired. Wuester and Smith, who had been riding in the back seat of Tallman’s car, barely escaped injury. Tallman was killed instantly in the attack.

A Detroit Police Department motorcycle patrolman who was in the area heard the shots and attempted to pursue the gunmen’s car. He ended up losing track of the car in traffic and pulled over another vehicle that turned out to be the wrong one.

Joe Moceri was suspected by Detroit police of being behind the murder of Tallman. On July 14, 1928, the day after Tallman was murdered, Moceri appeared at police headquarters with his attorney, Miles N. Cullahan. Moceri told the detectives that he and Joe Tallman had been business associates. He admitted that they had worked together for a long time pulling beer. Moceri explained that the sinking of his boat in the upper Detroit River by Joe Tallman was the result of bad feelings that Tallman harbored after Moceri quit him and went into business with other partners. He stated that Tallman had actually been a half owner of the boat that was sunk and had paid Moceri for it. He denied any knowledge of the killing. Moceri would later prove his alibi—he had been on a fishing trip with friends near Strawberry Island on Lake St. Clair the night Tallman was murdered.

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Aside from an ample supply of muscle, part of the success of the River Gang was due to Pete Licavoli’s ability to bribe various Customs and law-enforcement officials. The actual landing of liquor on the U.S. shore by boat from Canada was a Customs rather than a Prohibition law violation. Licavoli’s success in dealing with U.S. Customs officials continued for several years between 1925 and 1930. Then one night, a U.S. Customs inspector named Charles A. Nixon drank too much in a Detroit blind pig and began boasting out loud about being on Pete Licavoli’s payroll. His remarks were reported to U.S. Customs authorities. Nixon was investigated and later released from the U.S. Customs Service, when it was discovered that he had been taking bribes from rumrunners. This and other similar incidents prompted the U.S. Treasury Department to begin an investigation into the widespread corruption that was rumored to exist in the Detroit area Customs Service. A number of undercover Treasury Department agents were sent to Detroit to infiltrate the ranks of the local U.S. Customs officers and ferret out inspectors taking bribes. In 1928 a special undercover investigator from the Department of the Treasury named Lawrence Fleischman was offered $100 a month by Pete Licavoli. Two other Customs inspectors who worked with Fleischman named Shell Miller and James Mack were offered $200 a month each by Pete Licavoli to “lay off rumrunners landing cargoes. Fleischman, who later testified against Miller and Mack at their federal trial, claimed that Miller had originally demanded $1,000 a month from Licavoli but later agreed upon the lesser amount.

On November 4, 1929, Peter Licavoli was indicted by a Federal Grand Jury on the charge of bribing a Federal officer. Early in the morning of December 4, 1929, Licavoli was stopped and arrested by Detroit police and U.S. Customs inspectors. Licavoli was in the lead car in a column of four vehicles headed towards Detroit, when he was stopped by the officers on the Belle Isle Bridge. As he was being questioned regarding the federal arrest warrant, he suddenly jerked loose of the officers, jumped into one of the other cars in the column, and escaped in a hail of bullets. At least 20 shots were fired at Licavoli by police and Customs inspectors, with none hitting their mark. Several days after Licavoli had escaped from the officers, the bullet-riddled body of a man known as a local racketeer and rumrunner was fished out of a lagoon near the Scott Fountain at Belle Isle. It was assumed by Detroit police that the unidentified man had been operating on the river without the consent of the River Gang and had paid the price for his insolence.

On the morning of January 2, 1930, an assassination attempt was made on the life of Detroit Police Inspector Henry J. Garvin. The gunmen opened fire with pistols and sawed-off shotguns from another car that sped up alongside Garvin’s vehicle and ran it to the curb. Garvin was seriously wounded in the attack. An 11-year-old schoolgirl named Lois Bartlett, who had been near the scene at the time of the shooting, was in critical condition as the result of getting hit by stray shotgun pellets meant for Garvin. The attack on Garvin was followed by an extreme crackdown by the Detroit Police Department on the local underworld.

According to underworld sources, Pete Licavoli decided to voluntarily turn himself in on the U.S. charge rather than possibly be shot on sight by Detroit police who were seeking him as a suspect in the Garvin shooting. The River Gang leaders were all suspects in the attempted murder of Garvin. Pete Licavoli, in the company of his attorney, turned himself in to federal authorities on the bribery warrant. He pleaded not guilty before Federal Judge Edward J. Moinet and was released on a $10,000 bond. He was promptly arrested for investigation by Detroit police officers and taken to police headquarters, where he was questioned about the attack on Garvin. Joe Moceri was also one of many River Gang mobsters who were arrested and questioned in the police dragnet following the Garvin shooting.

In 1931, Pete Licavoli was named in a second indictment handed down by a federal grand jury for bribing U.S. Customs officers James Mack and Shell Miller and attempting to bribe undercover agent Lawrence Fleischman. Mack and Miller were eventually convicted of accepting money from Licavoli in return for allowing his boats to land their liquor cargoes in the U.S. They were both sentenced to two years in Leavenworth Penitentiary.

Pete Licavoli was also indicted in 1931 by the Buckley Grand Jury in Wayne County for his alleged participation in the murder of Jerry Buckley, a popular WMBC radio commentator. Buckley had been shot to death in the lobby of the LaSalle Hotel in July of 1930. In the fall of 1931, Peter Licavoli was arrested in Toledo, Ohio, and returned to Detroit on October 2, 1931, to face the various charges that were pending against him. He was released for lack of evidence in the Buckley murder case, but in time he stood trial on the U.S. charge. Licavoli was convicted of bribing a U.S. Customs officer as a result of the testimony of undercover Treasury Department Agent Lawrence Fleischman. Fleischman’s testimony was corroborated by ex-Customs Inspector Shell Miller, who had already been convicted of taking bribes. On June 22, 1933, Peter Licavoli was sentenced to serve two years in Leavenworth Penitentiary and pay a fine of $1,000.

Joseph Moceri, Roy Pascuzzi, Secretary-Treasurer of the Riverside Brewery Company of Riverside, Ontario, his brother Joe Pascuzzi, and Sam Goldberg, all leaders or business associates of the River Gang, were all convicted of conspiracy to violate the U.S. Prohibition laws in 1930. The four men were sentenced to serve two years each in federal prison. Moceri was fined $3,000, Roy Pascuzzi $5,000, Goldberg $2,000, and Joe Pascuzzi $2,000. The men were sentenced by Judge Edward J. Moinet in Detroit’s Federal Court on May 21, 1930. The group had been convicted of operating a liquor syndicate by using boats, trucks, and automobiles for transporting contraband across the Detroit River. The conviction was primarily based on evidence that was obtained when federal Prohibition agents tapped the telephone lines to offices used by various members of the River Gang to run their rum-running and marketing operations. After a number of appeals, the men were finally sent to prison to serve out their sentences. Moceri was convicted on a second liquor law violation while he was still out on bond for the first charge. He was caught in a raid and charged with operating a liquor cutting plant in Grosse Pointe Farms. He pleaded guilty on the second charge and was sentenced by Federal Judge Moinet to serve his second sentence concurrently with the original sentence imposed.

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Frank Cammarata and Thomas “Yonnie” Licavoli were released from Canadian prison in May of 1930 and returned to Detroit. Deportation proceedings were started against Cammarata in early 1931 for entering the United States within five years of having committed a crime.

In February of 1931 Frank Cammarata’s legal difficulties were compounded when he was brought to trial for his participation in the People’s Bank of Wayne County robbery in 1925. The case was heard before Judge Donald VanZile in Detroit Recorders Court. Cammarata had been the only one of four gunmen originally arrested and formally charged in the robbery case. He was convicted on the original charge and given a 15- to 30-year sentence in the State Prison of Southern Michigan at Jackson on February 26, 1931. His conviction was upheld after several appeals to higher courts. Cammarata’s armed-robbery sentence was eventually repealed by Michigan Governor Frank Fitzgerald in 1936, to time served. This was done in order to deport Cammarata to his native Sicily as an undesirable alien.

In January of 1937, Cammarata was deported to Sicily, only to sneak back into the United States in 1939. His presence in the U.S. was not discovered until 1948, when he was picked up with a number of other suspects in a police raid on a Grosse Pointe, Michigan, address.

The fact that Frank Cammarata had been brought to trial on the old armed-robbery charge more than five years after his initial arrest in the case and almost a year after his release from Canadian prison was unique. It had much to do with the Detroit political climate after the assassination of WMBC radio commentator Jerry Buckley in July of 1930. A number of River Gang associates were suspects in the murder, and anyone associated with the Licavoli brothers was put under intense scrutiny by the Buckley Grand Jury. This grand jury had been called to investigate conditions that led to the rampant Detroit crime wave in the summer of 1930.

Thomas Yonnie Licavoli operated in Detroit for a short time after his release from Canadian prison in May of 1930. In early 1931, Yonnie Licavoli and his gang moved their operations to the Toledo, Ohio, area. They immediately began organizing the Toledo and northern Ohio rackets. Yonnie met little resistance from local Toledo racketeers, and those who did not cooperate were quickly eliminated.

A good example of the swift retribution of the Licavoli Mob was the daytime execution of Abe (Abe the Punk) Lubitsky, a numbers operator in the Toledo, Ohio, area. Lubitsky was suspected of giving information to a federal grand jury by Jacob (Firetop) Sulkin, a political fixer for the Licavoli Mob in Toledo. Sulkin believed that Lubitsky had talked because Lubitsky had been given favorable treatment by the federal judge in charge of the grand jury investigation. On October 6, 1931, Lubitsky, Norman (Big Agate) Blatt, and one of their employees named Hyman (Nig) Abrams were driving to Lubitsky’s home from a downtown Toledo restaurant. As they stopped for a traffic light, another car pulled up alongside Lubitsky’s and several gunmen opened fire with shotguns and pistols. Lubitsky and Blatt were killed. Abrams managed to crawl out of the passenger-side door of the car and roll underneath the vehicle, escaping injury. Lubitsky had been following his brother Morris, who had been in the car in front of his. Morris ran back to find his brother and Blatt mortally wounded. Abe’s last words were, “Morris, it was the dagos.”

Thomas Yonnie Licavoli and his Ohio Mob rode high for several years until Licavoli and several of his lieutenants were convicted of first-degree murder. The conviction was the final result of the 1933 murder of Jack Kennedy, a popular Toledo blind pig operator and bootlegger. Kennedy had successfully resisted the Licavoli Mob’s muscle for a short time. Yonnie was convicted not of pulling the trigger but of being the Mob boss who had set the plan into motion and conspired to kill Kennedy. At that time, this was a novel legal theory on which to base the prosecution’s arguments in a murder case. It was one of the first successful prosecutions of a gangland boss based on a conspiracy premise. Licavoli received a life sentence as a result of the conviction. He could have been sentenced to death in the electric chair, but the jury asked for leniency.

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Increased federal Prohibition enforcement on the Detroit River would eventually lead to the demise of the River Gang’s profitable liquor hauling business by 1930. This, however, would have little effect on the brewing Mob war that was about to explode in the Detroit underworld in 1930. The dispute would be between the rival Detroit Mafia factions known as the Eastside and Westside Mobs.

“Whenever Ches LaMare is going to bump somebody off he ain’t going to tell any copper.”

—Chester LaMare, 1924

F
ebruary 17, 1930, was a somber day in Detroit’s Italian community. That morning a large crowd of people gathered at the Church of the Most Holy Family in Detroit to pay their last respects to Salvatore “Sam” Catalanotte. Catalanotte died several days before in his luxurious Grosse Pointe home of complications resulting from pneumonia. His death occurred one day before his 36th birthday. Sam Catalanotte had developed a reputation as a kind and charitable man among the residents of Detroit’s “Little Italy.” He was rumored to have amassed a fortune through various business ventures that was estimated to be almost a million dollars by the time of his death. Most of this money had been given away to needy Italians according to friends of the family. A massive funeral procession of more than 200 cars left the church following the mass. The body was laid to rest at Mt. Olivet Cemetery on Detroit’s near east side. Several vehicles were required to transport almost $5,000 worth of flowers to the grave site. The funeral was reported to have cost more than $20,000 and was one of the most extravagant in Detroit history. The mourners were a mixed lot that included immediate family, friends of the family, wealthy bankers, merchants, and racketeers.