The Mob and the City (27 page)

I never was a crumb, and if I have to be a crumb I'd rather be dead.

—Charles Luciano (1936)

And what did I get out of it? Nothing but misery.

—Joseph Valachi (1963)

Philip “Philly Katz” Albanese was part of the wave of street soldiers who reshaped organized crime on the waterfront. Born to immigrant parents on the Lower East Side, Philip went bad as a young man and, in 1935, was sent to prison for robbery. When he got out, Albanese did strongarm work for the Luciano Family and became a public loader of fruit on the Hudson River piers when they were still majority Irish. He also started moving narcotics on the waterfront.
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Albanese enjoyed his new prosperity by moving his family to the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Riverdale in the north Bronx. In 1946, he was convicted on a narcotics conspiracy, but the drug sentences were weak then, and he spent only nine months in jail. In the early 1950s, Albanese moved his family again, this time to suburban Valley Stream, Long Island.
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Then the Internal Revenue Service went after him. Federal prosecutors showed that Albanese “operated behind a paper wall of false and fictitious records to disguise his own financial interests” in a loading company. In 1954, Albanese was convicted of tax evasion for failing to pay $6,700 in taxes on his loader income between 1946 and 1950 (over $55,000 in 2013 dollars). At sentencing, prosecutors called him “one of the criminal rats which infest our
waterfront today.” Enraged by the remark, Albanese leapt up out of his chair and yelled, “My business was oranges and grapefruits which come in on freighters!”
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We now have rich sources on the lives of wiseguys like Phil Albanese. In 1963, Senator John McClellan conducted groundbreaking hearings on the Cosa Nostra (hereafter “the McClellan Committee hearings”), which collect a wealth of untapped data on mob soldiers and their criminal activities. In addition, there are now dozens of mob memoirs, trial transcripts, and transcripts of
mafiosi
wiretaps. Although these sources have to be used with care, they can provide great insights on everyday life in the mob.
⁴
Using the tools of social history, we can better understand the lives of wiseguys.

THE LIVES THEY CHOSE

Most young men who joined the Mafia did
not
do so because they lacked other choices but because they wanted to be wiseguys. For all the talk of the Honored Society defending the Sicilian peasantry, twentieth-century New York City was not
Il Mezzogiorno
(impoverished Southern Italy). Although Sicilian immigrants faced rampant bigotry and tough working conditions, Italian Americans soon had unprecedented opportunities. Gotham had nearly a million manufacturing jobs for blue-collar workers, and the economy was fairly booming after the Great Depression. By 1950, New York's unemployment rate was under 7 percent and most children (86 percent) ages fourteen to seventeen were attending school. To join the Mafia was to rebel
against
the immigrant Italian work ethic.
⁵

Wiseguys themselves almost never claim that they needed to join the Cosa Nostra to escape grinding poverty. Rather, most simply wanted an easier life. “I was never a crumb, and if I have to be a crumb I'd rather be dead,” said Charles Luciano. He described a “crumb” as the ordinary man “who works and saves and lays his money aside.”
⁶
As ex-
mafioso
Rocco Morelli explained, “I was always looking for a hustle, a get-rich-quick scheme—whatever it took to make a buck so I wouldn't have to work hard like my dad.”
⁷
The Cosa Nostra subverted the work ethic. “You can lie, steal, cheat, kill, and it's all legitimate,” marveled Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, who grew up in lower-middle-class
Knickerbocker Village.
⁸
The mobster lifestyle fascinated young men. “All we knew was that they were better off than everybody else and people treated them as if they were important,” Willie Fopiano recalled of Boston's North End mobsters. “They seemed to move in some exciting, secret world that was invisible to anyone who wasn't one of them.”
⁹

The Cosa Nostra was peddling an idea to young men drawn to its promises of honor and loyalty. “So many fine words! So many fine principles!” Antonio Calderone remembered of his initiation ceremony into the Mafia. “I really felt that I belonged to a brotherhood that had honor and respect,” recalled Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, the son of middle-class parents from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Of course, the Cosa Nostra did not live up to advertising. As Calderone discovered: “So many times over the ensuing years did I find myself confronted by a lack of respect for these rules—by deceit, betrayal, murder committed precisely to exploit the good faith of those who believed in them.” Likewise, Gravano became disillusioned. “I got to learn that the whole thing was bullshit,” Gravano said. “I mean, we broke every rule in the book.”
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GOING TO THE OFFICE

Mafia soldiers went to their version of the office. The mobster's office was usually hidden behind a front, literally and figuratively. Federal narcotics agent Charles Siragusa recalls the “many political clubs that were hangouts for the gangster elite” in the 1930s. The front of the Abraham Lincoln Independent Political Club in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, had an espresso machine and card tables, where men played pinochle and talked football. In the back of the club, behind a door marked “Private,” was the office where mob boss Joe Bonanno conducted the real business.
¹¹

Others preferred the anonymity of shabby storefronts. Cantalupo Realty looked like any another real-estate office in Brooklyn. However, as the front man Joseph Cantalupo recalled, each day
mafiosi
“were buzzed in daily through the small gate at the office waiting room, past what was my desk, down a short corridor to the private office on the left where [Joe] Colombo sat directing the traffic of his crime family.” New England boss Ray Patriarca's office was at the
rear of a vending machine business. “The place was far from classy, more poor than rich, but when people spoke of ‘the Office’ this is what they meant,” said Joe “The Animal” Barboza.
¹²

The wiseguy's day had its own kind of rhythm. “Everybody socialized while Nicky conducted business in another room,” said mob soldier Andrew DiNota, describing Gambino Family
caporegime
Nicholas Corozzo's social club. Goodfellas would sit around gossiping and trading information about potential scores, like which new gambling card games to shake down or new truck shipments to hijack. Then, at night, the crew “would hit various nightclubs or restaurants popular with the wiseguys and sit around planning new scores or reminiscing about old ones,” said Joseph Pistone, the undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the Bonanno Family.
¹³

STREET WORK

So, what exactly did wiseguys do for “work”? In 1963, the McClellan Committee hearings identified hundreds of Mafia soldiers and their activities. Based on data collected by the McClellan Committee,
table 7–1
shows the top activities of the New York Mafia's soldiers in the 1950s and early 1960s:

We have previously explored the cornerstone activities of gambling (
chapter 2
), labor racketeering (
chapter 4
), and narcotics trafficking (
chapter 5
). Now let us look briefly at some of the wiseguy's other major activities.

Strongarm: Assault and Battery, Extortion, and Murder

The Cosa Nostra had earned its reputation for violence. Nearly half of New York's soldiers had been involved in “strongarm” crimes like assault and battery, usually to enforce other rackets. Extortion—obtaining property through fear of violence—was a common crime of wiseguys, too. The Mafia's power rested, ultimately, on its capacity for violence.

Many of the Mafia's top leaders started out as strongarm men, including Luciano Family boss Frank Costello (convicted of illegal gun possession in 1915), Lucchese Family boss Carmine Tramunti (convicted of felony assault in 1931), and Gambino Family boss Paul Castellano (convicted of robbery in 1934).
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Mob leaders were always on the lookout for potential new soldiers, too. Andrew DiDonato gained attention of mobsters after he started extorting money from other criminals despite being only 5 feet, 9 inches and 160 pounds. “They knew if they fucked around with me, I'd get ’em with my fists, or a bat, or a tire iron,” said DiDonato of his shakedown targets. A Gambino Family crew soon recruited him into the mob.
¹⁶

And sometimes the mob's soldiers murdered people. Contrary to myth, not every
mafioso
was a murderer (see below). But the Mafia's enforcers racked up a grisly human toll. Joe Valachi publicly detailed his roles in executing six different people.
¹⁷
Gambino Family underboss Salvatore “Sammy The Bull” Gravano
confessed to being involved in some way in eighteen homicides.
¹⁸
Some were utterly remorseless: Carmine “Lilo” Galante was clinically diagnosed as a “psychopath” by prison psychiatrists in Sing Sing.
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Wiseguys tried to rationalize away various murders. “We do not kill innocent people,” insisted Vincent “Fish” Cafaro. He then ticked off what he saw as justifiable reasons for committing homicides, like being “a rat” or “your family got abused by someone.” The mob's soldiers purported to distinguish themselves from professional contract killers. “I don't believe in killing for money,” asserted Joseph “Hoboken Joe” Stassi. “There was always another reason, cheating or talking to the law, disobeying orders. They had a reason, even if the reason wasn't always right.”
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