The Mafia Encyclopedia (45 page)

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Page 122

Italy. He hustled huge stocks of cigarettes, liquor, wheat, food and medicines on the black market; it was as though the crime kingpin had never left New York.

Genovese carried passes that gave him free access to supply bases throughout Italy and he bore testimonials of his great devotion to the United States. Military officers, who later demonstrated no inclination to prosecute Genovese after he was exposed, attested to his "invaluable" contributions to the war effort. He was, they said, "honest ... trustworthy, loyal and dependable ... worked day and night ... exposed several cases of bribery and black-market operations among so-called civilian personnel ... is devoted to his adopted home, the U.S.A. ... served without any compensation whatever."

Compensation or no, Genovese had made and salted away millions. His testimony, which was so valuable in breaking up operations of other black marketeers, was nothing more than a move to get rid of competitors. Dickey tracked Genovese down and arrested him. He found Genovese's apartment in Naples; the young sergeant said later he had never been inside such a lavishly furnished place or seen so extensive a wardrobe for one man. This was in a time of wartime misery for most civilians.

At first Dickey did not know who Genovese was, not even having heard the name before. However, Genovese had made underworld enemies in his criminal operations and a tipster supplied Dickey with a publication from the 1930s which bore Genovese's photograph and identified him as a notorious member of the American underworld.

In August Dickey forwarded a communication to the FBI in Washington advising the agency of Genovese's apprehension and inquiring about any outstanding charges against him. He got no answer until the end of November when he was told a warrant would arrive from Brooklyn shortly on a murder charge.

In the meantime Dickey faced enormous pressure to release Genovese. When he reported his findings to the provisional U.S. officer at Nola, he was ordered to drop the investigation. Instead Dickey went to Rome where he saw Colonel Poletti who refused to discuss the case. Dickey then turned to Brigadier General William O'Dwyer, in Italy on leave from his post as Brooklyn district attorney. It was a waste of time. Incredibly, O'Dwyer, who had overseen the prosecution of Murder, Inc., blandly told Dickey that Genovese was of no "concern" to him.

When a crestfallen Dickey returned to Naples he was ordered by superiors to take Genovese out of a military prison and have him either put under bond or transferred to a civilian jail. Stubbornly, Dickey chose the second alternative, tucking him away in the most secure Italian jail he could find and constantly checking up personally on his prisoner.

Finally in December confirmation came from Brooklyn that a warrant would be sent. By this time Genovese realized all his powerful supporters had been unable to pressure Dickey, and so he offered the $210-a-month non-commissioned officer a quarter of a million dollars in cash simply to "forget" about him.

"There are things you don't understand," Genovese said. "This is the way it works. Take the money. You are set for the rest of your life. Nobody cares what you do. Why should you?"

When finally Dickey was not going to go for the bribe offer, Genovese turned vicious. He threatened to have Dickey and his family killed.

Nothing worked, and Dickey and his prisoner boarded a troop ship bound for home. Aboard ship, Genovese's tone changed again. He was very relaxed. "Kid," he told Dickey, "you are doing me the biggest favor anyone has ever done to me. You are taking me home. You are taking me back to the U.S.A."

It was almost as though Genovese knew something. He probably did. The murder charge against him required the testimony of two witnesses, Ernest Rupolo and Peter LaTempa, both hoodlums who had talked. If one was silenced, the murder case against Genovese would collapse.

Genovese landed on January 8, 1945. Immediately when the news broke, a frightened Peter LaTempa rushed to Brooklyn authorities and begged to be held in protective custody. He was placed in what was reported to be a secure cell. A week later LaTempa died there. He had been poisoned.

Genovese went free, and Sergeant Dickey was still a young but certainly a wiser man. Ironically, Genovese probably would not have returned to the United States on his own. His return, with Lucky Luciano removed from the scene, would greatly affect the development of the Mafia and organized crime in America.

See also:
LaTempa, Peter; Rupolo, Ernest "the Hawk
."

Dio, Johnny (19151979): Labor racketeer
Under crime family boss Tommy "Three-Finger Brown" Lucchese, Johnny Dio, real name John Dioguardi, was one of organized crime's top "labor relations experts"that is, labor racketeer. Dio was vital to Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, who used him in his efforts to capture control of the union in New York City. Authorities also said Dio was the man who ordered the acid blinding of labor columnist Victor Riesel in 1956. At the time Riesel was causing Hoffa a good deal of grief with his hard-hitting columns. The law had conspirators ready to testify

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Labor racketeer Johnny Dio (center, being booked) allegedly ordered the acid blinding of labor columnist
Victor Riesel to score points with Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa.

to Dio's role in the case but because of threats that reached them behind bars, these witnesses refused to speak in court and Dio went free.

Dio's standard labor relations method was to frighten everyone who might talk; it worked in the Riesel case as it did so often in the garment industry where the Lucchese Family established any number of shops with no labor difficulties of any sort. If other manufacturers wanted the same consideration, they had to pay for Dio's assent. The underworld looked upon Dio as a master of his craft and other crime families invited him into their area to show them how to engage in the same rackets.

The Dragna family in Los Angeles brought Dio in as a consultant to advise on how to open factories by controlling the unions. Dio's blueprint for financial success showed the Dragna forces how to use terror against the International Ladies Garment Workers Union so that mob businesses could run without worrying about union pay scales and rules. By getting waivers on just about every contractual stipulation, the mob businesses got the edge on competitors who had to run under strict union conditions. The Dragna plan worked to perfection; profits, using what amounted to Mexican slave labor, were enormous.

Dio, who started out in crime as a protege of Louis Lepke and Gurrah Shapiro, worked as a soldier in the Brooklyn Murder, Inc., troop. In the 1930s, New York racketbuster Thomas E. Dewey described Dio as "a young gorilla who began his career at the age of 15." By the age of 20, Dio was already an important mobster and a gang chieftain at 24. In the 1950s Senate investigators named Hoffa and Dio as the masterminds behind paper locals of the union that eventually got control of the highly remunerative airport trucking business in New York City. "It cannot be said, using the widest possible latitude," the McClellan Committee declared, ''that John Dioguardi was ever interested in bettering the lot of the workingman."

Informer Joe Valachi was able to add some additional illuminating details about Dio. For about 12 years Valachi had a dress shop on Prospect Avenue in the Bronx, operated completely by non-union Puerto Rican women. "I never belonged to any union [sic]," Valachi testified. "If I got in trouble, any union organizer came around, all I had to do was call up John Dio or Tommy Dio and all my troubles were straightened out."

Dio was finally convicted when he branched out into stock fraud and he was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1973. He died in a hospital in Pennsylvania where he was moved from a penitentiary by federal authorities. Dio's death attracted no newspaper attention for several days, even though a paid death notice appeared in the
New York Daily News
. It was as if the name Dioguardi had not meant anything.

See also:
Riesel, Victor; Telvi, Abraham
.

Page 124

Dirty Graft: Payoffs to police and courts.
Corrupt police officers frequently make a distinction between "clean graft" and "dirty graft." There are many who will accept so-called clean money but reject so-called dirty money. Clean graft is paid for overlooking such violations as gambling rackets, loansharking, liquor violations, prostitution and other activities described as vices natural to man. But police officers who accept clean graft turn down payoffs from mobsters engaged in narcotics violations. Drug money is considered dirty and not to be touchedusually.

As the Knapp Commission, which studied police corruption in New York City, noted, many officers who would take nothing but clean graft considered robbing narcotics dealers "clean," since "the City is going to get it [the money] anyway and why shouldn't they." As one witness explained at the commission hearings on stealing from arrested drug dealers: "The general feeling was that the man was going to jail, was going to get what was coming to him, so why should you give him back his money and let him bail himself out. In a way we felt that he was a narcotics pusher, we knew he was a narcotics pusher, we kind of felt he didn't deserve no rights since he was selling narcotics.'' In one typical arrest $127,000 was turned in to the Department while three officers split an additional $80,000. In another case $150,000 was confiscated and only $50,000 turned in while the arresting officers took $100,000 for themselves.

The corrupting influence of money can become overwhelming for most cops. Jack Newfield of the
Village Voice
told of a black officer in the ghetto who locked up a heroin dealer. The dealer had on his person $5,000 more than the cop's annual salary and offered the entire sum to the officer to let him loose. The cop turned it down, and the dealer said, "Don't be a fool. If you don't take it, the judge will."

It was, unfortunately, a statement with considerable accuracy to it. There seem to be plenty of judges who will accept the mob's dirty graft. The record of the courts in New York City has been singularly disheartening. In the 1970s the State's Joint Legislative Committee on Crime, chaired by Republican Senator John Hughes of Syracuse, showed that major heroin dealers systematically received more lenient treatment than other defendants. Over a 10-year period 44.7 percent of indictments against organized crime figures were dismissed by State Supreme Court justices, compared to only 11.5 percent for all defendants. In 193 cases where mafiosi were convicted by a jury, the judge let the defendants off with no prison sentence 46 percent of the time. In Brooklyn, a staff report indicated that only 6 percent of heroin dealers charged with felonies got more than one year in prison. In the Bronx by contrast the comparable figure was 31.6 percent. Tolerant Brooklyn judges dismissed 42 percent of the felony cases against heroin dealers compared to only 15 percent of such cases thrown out by Bronx judges. (Three of the city's five Mafia crime familiesthe Gambinos, the Colombos and the Bonannoshave been centered in the hospitable borough of Brooklyn.)

Judges with records of coddling Mafia narcotics men cannot be ferreted out by simple analysis of their total narcotics sentencing figures. Most tend to be "tough judges" in run-of-the-mill cases involving minor characters against whom they throw the book. In some cases even the district attorney's offices have criticized cases of "oversentencing," allowing such judges to denounce the prosecutors as being "soft on criminals."

Unfortunately, there has never been the equivalent of a Knapp Commission for the investigation of the judiciary that can compare with the unit's work on police corruption. Consequently, we know more of the mob-connected activities of the police than those of the courts.

The Knapp Commission concluded that a "sizeable majority" of the city's 30,000 policemen took some form of graft. More sickening perhaps is the fact that the number of cops willing, able and eager to take dirty graft was obviously increasing. The commission noted, "[M]ore relaxed attitudes toward drugs, particularly among young people, and the enormous profits to be derived from drug traffic have combined to make narcotics-related payoffs more acceptable to more and more policemen." Graft from drug rackets puts young policemen in more direct crime contact with the Mafia and organized crime, which constitutes, as the saying goes, "the General Motors of the narcotics racket."

The taking of clean graft from the mob legitimizes the acceptance of dirty drug money as well, eventually; once cops are on the take they are willing to do ever more to keep the money flowing. The following, in the Knapp Commission's words, are some of the typical patterns or "numerous-instant" conduct exhibited by dirty graft takers: