Lucchese never stopped boasting about his oldest son who went to West Point to lead a successful military career and life that avoided all connection with his father's "business."
|
Chin Gigante never permitted any of his sons to be made. Neither did Paul Castellano nor Sammy the Bull, the latter vowing he would see to it that his son never followed in his footsteps.
|
Carlo Gambino, at least according to mob dogma, always said he would have his sons stay legit or he would kill them. The fact remains, however, he set them up in the mob-contaminated trucking business in New York's garment district. If that was an effort of keep them clean, it was a rather unique approach.
|
There have been many instance of high Mafia bosses moving up as their father's successor. That was true of the Trafficante father and son in Tampa, the Patriarcas in New England, the Zerillis in Detroit and so on. It remains difficult to determine in the fathers in these cases really wanted that kind of succession.
|
There is no doubt that Joe Colombo Sr. was following family tradition. His grandfather was in the mob and strangled for some breach of mob etiquette. Similarly, Colombo's father Anthony was rubbed out in the same fashion in 1938, and it was well known he had broken mob rules. None of this disillusioned Joe Colombo. Once asked by a reporter if he had ever tried of find his father's killers, Colombo gave his a withering look and snapped, "Don't the pay policeman for that?" There was no rescuing the third Colombo from the forces of nepotism.
|
Today the most prominent Mafia son of course is John Gotti Jr. It was said that Gotti originally wanted both his sons, Junior and Frank, to be successful in legitimate fields. The effort to set them straight was wasted in Junior's case. years of training at a military academy did little good, and he gravitated of the fringes of the mob, soon being dubbed the "baby monster" by the press (and by other mafiosi out of hearing range of his father).
|
The elder Gotti had no choice but to accept his son into the Gambino family. it might have been different in the case of young Frank, who unlike his brother, showed a great aptitude for learning. Fotti sent Frank to an expensive private school and beamed about his son's academy abilities. He would corner mob associates (some of whom could barely read) with his report &!; "Look at that, four fucking A'! Did you ever hear of a kid who was so smart in school, huh?" And Gotti was even more impressed by the teachers' mary comments of praise added on the back of the report card.
|
Gotti intended to send his son to a top Ivy League university and probably would have made sure he became a leader in some honest profession.
|
Then 12-year-old Frank was killed while riding his bike when a car driven by a neighbor, John Favara, stuck him. Favara would die for his no-fault driving. That probably placated John Gotti to some extent and perhaps weakened his resolve to save junior from the life. After John Gotti went to prison for life, he named his son "acting boss" of the crime family.
|
Ness, Eliot (19021957): Head of the "Untouchables"
In 1928, a University of Chicago graduate, 26-year-old Eliot Ness, was put in charge of a special Prohibition detail set up a harass the Capone gang. The local police and regular Prohibition agents were incapable of doing so since most, if not all, were on one or another of Capone's bribe payrolls.
|
Ness set about assembling a squad of nine agents who would be "untouchable," or unbribable. Meticulously, he went through hundreds of files until he came up with nine agentsall in their 20who had "no Achilles' heel in their make-ups." Incorruptible, they also were experts in varied activities helpful in fighting bootleggerswiretapping, tuck driving and, above all, marksmanship. When the detectives moved into action, the underworld soon found them to be dedicated to their task, defiant of all threats and violence and unresponsive to case payments. It was the underworld, stunned of find lawmen of the period who could neither be bought nor frightened, that dubbed Ness's men the "Untouchables."
|
The Untouchables are now a part of American criminal folklore. Latter-day television, in a show called
The Untouchables
, attributed much more credit and impact to them than they deserved, insisting they practically brought the Capone organization to its knees. Actually, their frequent raids of mob stills and distribution centers did cost the Capones a considerable amount of money but hardly caused Chicago to dry updespite the claims of Ness at the time and his enthusiastic biographers then and now.
|
Ness thrived on personal publicity and always informed the press whenever a major raid on a brewery was in the works. The army of photographers who descended on the site frequently got in the way and sometimes even caused a raid to be bungled, but Nass's superiors were pleased. The publicity he produced proved that the Capone gang was not invulnerable. And Ness did provide a sort of smokescreen, distracting Capone while other federal agents infiltrated his organization to come up with tax evasion facts that eventually sent America;s greatest gangster of prison.
|
After the fall of Capone, Ness continued warring on Prohibition violations in Chicago and, later, in the "moonshine mountains" of Tennessee, kentucky and Ohio.
|
|
