The Mob and the City (42 page)

Although Croswell was an honest cop, some of his freelance tactics were controversial even at the time. An appellate judge dubbed him “a modern Inspector Javert” after reviewing his thirteen-year personal campaign against Barbara.
⁹⁵
The state police's detention of the men was of questionable legality in 1957, and it would almost certainly be ruled unconstitutional today. Under
the Fourth Amendment, the state police had no reasonable suspicion or probable cause of criminal activity to detain, search, and question the men for hours at the Vestal substation. All that the state police knew was that individuals with criminal records had parked their cars at a private residence.
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“Actually, we had no legal basis for doing what we did do,” Croswell later candidly admitted. “If we stuck directly to the letter of the law, we couldn't have found out what we did,” he acknowledged.
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Lastly, a major conspiracy theory was ignited by Jewish gangster Joseph “Doc” Stacher when he told the authors of a 1979 biography of Meyer Lansky that Apalachin was a set-up of Vito Genovese. “Meyer and I were invited but he sent word that as it was November he did not want to make the journey north from Miami,” asserted Stacher. He suggests that Lansky tipped off the police to the meeting. “Nobody to this day knows that it was Meyer who arranged for Genovese's humiliation,” claimed Stacher.
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This story has all the makings of a tall tale. It rests entirely on Stacher, who was known as a “boastful” man prone to self-aggrandizement. Lansky never corroborated the story, and it has not come up in any wiretap. The story is implausible on its face, too. Apalachin was strictly a meeting of the Cosa Nostra with no Jewish or Irish gangsters, which was not unusual for high-level Mafia meetings. Moreover, it would have been wildly out of character for Lansky to alienate the entire Commission to satisfy a grudge. “When it came to the mechanics of group relations, Meyer also had the ability, rare at any age, to mediate and settle difference through intelligence and reason,” described a better biography of Lansky.
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THE AGENDA

Speculation has raged about the purposes of Apalachin. Statements by informants have leaked out that, when combined with other facts, reveal the agenda of the meeting.

At the top of the agenda was resolving the leadership successions following the assassinations of 1957. The Apalachin attendees were high-ranking
mafiosi
who had survived the assassinations of the early 1930s. They had little desire for
another bloody conflict. Joe Valachi said the meeting was “to talk about…justifying the shooting Albert Anastasia.” Other informants have confirmed that dealing with the 1957 killings was the crucial issue.
¹⁰⁰

Casino gambling in Cuba was a pressing matter, too. Anastasia had been seeking to encroach on Santo Trafficante's casino interests in Havana. FBI informants reported that Apalachin included “consideration of an agreement about the Havana gambling situation and other gambling in Florida.” Trafficante went to stave off future encroachments. It was all for naught. In thirteen months, the Cuban revolution would reach Havana.
¹⁰¹

For other attendees, Apalachin was another opportunity to discuss more traditional issues of territory and cooperation. Former Teamsters president Roy Williams testified of a conversation he had with Nick Civella after the mobster was caught at Apalachin. “Civella told me that, among other things, territory and cooperation was discussed,” Williams recounted. “Civella said he had Kansas City as his territory. He had working relations with other areas. He had friends in Chicago, he had friends in Cleveland, and he had friends in New Orleans.”
¹⁰²

Others claim narcotics was on the agenda. After fibbing about his presence, Joe Bonanno tried to spin its purpose: “Another item on the Apalachin agenda was supposed to be the narcotics issue,” said Bonanno. “If the 1957 meeting had gone according to plan there no doubt would have been a reaffirmation of our Tradition's opposition to narcotics.”
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Journalist Selwyn Raab asserts an “emergency item on the agenda was setting policy on coping with the stricter new federal law—the Boggs-Daniel Act—and dealing with the Sicilian heroin importers.”
¹⁰⁴
The author Gil Reavill goes further, writing that New York bosses (without Commission member Tommy Lucchese even present)
did
reach an agreement that morning in Apalachin. Supposedly, they agreed that “the American Mafia gets out of the wholesale heroin smuggling business” by spinning off importing and smuggling to “the Corsicans,” while “retail street distribution, that's another matter.”
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The notion that the Apalachin summit's focus was to be on drugs is dubious. The Mafia had been heavily involved in narcotics trafficking since the 1930s. Three attendees—John Ormento, Frank Cucchiara, and Joseph Civello—were already convicted narcotics offenders. Moreover, the Boggs-Daniel Act was
enacted to fanfare in July 1956, three months
before
the October 1956 meeting of the Commission.
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It is difficult to understand why
mafiosi
would travel from all over the country, again, for an “emergency item” that had been in the news prior to the 1956 meeting. Meanwhile, Reavill's questionable account fails to appreciate long-term historical trends: as we saw earlier, the American Mafia had relied on Corsican drug smugglers since the 1930s, and it had been moving away from risky “retail street distribution” and toward wholesaling for decades.
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OMERTÀ
HOLDS

In 1958, the State Commission of Investigation in New York and the McClellan Committee in Washington, DC, subpoenaed attendees to testify about the meeting. After pleading the Fifth Amendment, and much legal wrangling, some did testify.

It was a farce. New York boss Joseph Profaci claimed he just stopped by Barbara's while selling olive oil for his Fratelli Berio Distributing Company. Profaci told Barbara to “have faith in God.” Meanwhile, Joseph Magliocco testified that he was just chauffeuring Profaci and did not know they were going to Barbara's: “The first time I heard it, it was this time we take the road to get up into the hill by Barbara,” insisted Magliocco.
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In his testimony before the McClellan Committee in Washington, John Montana stuck to his story that he had just coincidentally stopped by Barbara's house for car repairs. “Mr. Montana, you did not realize until the following day that you had five other friends that were present at that meeting?” Robert Kennedy asked incredulously. “I did not,” Montana insisted.
¹⁰⁹
Meanwhile, Lucchese
consigliere
Vincent Rao said he went for free food. “There's nothing to discuss,” Rao shrugged. “I went and had a steak and it was an expensive steak.”
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In 1959, the Justice Department prosecuted the Apalachin attendees on an attenuated charge of conspiracy. Conceding that they lacked any evidence about the criminal aims of the meeting, federal prosecutors grasped for a theory: they alleged that during the forty minutes after Mrs. Barbara saw the state police (12:40 p.m. to 1:20 p.m.), the attendees entered into a conspiracy to commit perjury and obstruct justice, should they later be called to testify publicly. The
jury convicted twenty of the attendees on this theory, but the Court of Appeals reversed all of their convictions.
¹¹¹

The
mafiosi
caught at Apalachin ultimately escaped the law by maintaining
omertà
. Although the wall of silence had been breached in the past, none of the Apalachin attendees turned state's evidence. Had even a single defendant turned state's evidence and testified about the meeting's criminal purposes, the convictions almost certainly would have been upheld. The leadership of the American Mafia would have been imprisoned in one fell swoop. But the attendees knew the state police had nothing on any of them, so none of them flipped.
Omertà
, the conspiracy of silence, ironically, had beaten a conspiracy case.

FALLOUT WITHIN THE MAFIA

Notwithstanding its legal victory, the Cosa Nostra suffered lasting consequences from Apalachin. On a personal level, Joe Barbara never recovered from the scrutiny. On June 15, 1959, he died of another heart attack at the age of fifty-three. His daughter attacked reporters covering his funeral: “You call us murderers, but you're the biggest murderers of us all,” she screamed.
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Apalachin publicly exposed and embarrassed the leadership of the Mafia. A wiretap picked up a conversation on Apalachin between Steve Magaddino and Sam Giancana:

Joe Bonanno saw it as an unmitigated disaster. “It was horrendous: all those men caught in the same place, a ton of publicity, a public-relations coup for law enforcement, a field day for journalists,” lamented Bonanno.
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Apalachin
further undermined the authority of the bosses. “The soldiers felt that if the soldiers made that kind of a meet and everyone got arrested they all would die if they made a mistake like the bosses,” complained Valachi.
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For the mob, 1957 marked a divide: Before Apalachin and After Apalachin. As Lucchese Family associate Henry Hill explained, the year 1956 was “a glorious time” because it was “just before Apalachin, before the wiseguys began having all the trouble.”
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Their troubles started when a stubborn man changed his mind.

THE SEAT OF GOVERNMENT, WASHINGTON, DC, NOVEMBER 1957

Though some like to imagine that FBI Director Hoover had a miserable day that Friday, November 15, 1957, this is more
schaudenfreude
than fact. Neither the
Washington Star
nor the
Washington Post
carried the news from Apalachin, and Attorney General Rogers was tied up in a cabinet meeting. The director kept his appointment with a bureau photographer, took his regular call from Clyde Tolson, and spoke with an Illinois congressman, the governor of Arizona, and a federal judge.
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But this was the calm before the storm.

By Monday, November 18, 1957, it was apparent that Apalachin would be a reckoning. Over the weekend, the United States Attorney for New York distanced himself from Hoover by going on record stating that the Apalachin meeting was “further proof of the existence of a criminal syndicate organized across state lines.”
¹¹⁸
That Monday morning, the first call into Hoover was from Attorney General Rogers. Meanwhile, the McClellan Committee was banging doors for intelligence on the attendees. “The FBI didn't know anything, really, about these people who were the major gangsters in the United States,” recounted Robert Kennedy. “I sent the same request to the Bureau of Narcotics, and they had something on every one of them.”
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DIRECTOR HOOVER BECOMES A BELIEVER

It took the colossal embarrassment of Apalachin to shake up Hoover. “Apalachin hit the FBI like a bomb,” recalled William Sullivan. Hoover went into a tirade, first blaming assistant FBI director Al Belmont, then the field agents in upstate New York. On November 27, 1957, twelve days after Apalachin, Hoover ordered all field offices to gather intelligence on the ten biggest “hoodlums” in their region under the Top Hoodlum Program.
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Hoover further assigned William Sullivan, head of the FBI's Research and Analysis Section, to write a comprehensive report on organized crime. Sullivan appointed one of his best men, Charles Peck, to lead the project. Since the FBI had so little intelligence on the Mafia, Peck's team relied on news articles, the Kefauver Committee hearings, and other enforcement agencies.
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Completed in July 1958, Peck's 280-page report contradicted Hoover's longstanding position. “There have been again insistent allegations of the existence of the Mafia in the United States. There have been also denials,” the report opened diplomatically. After setting forth all the evidence, the report stated forcefully: “
The truth of the matter is, the available evidence makes it impossible to deny logically the existence of a criminal organization, known as the Mafia, which for generations has plagued the law-abiding citizens of Sicily, Italy, and the United States
.”
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With trepidation, Sullivan submitted the report to the director. Hoover responded quickly with a handwritten note: “The point has been missed. It is not now necessary to read the two volume monograph to know that the Mafia does exist in the United States.” Sullivan felt relieved. “The battle had been won. Hoover finally gave in,” said Sullivan.
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Behind the scenes, the FBI's field agents went into action. “A furious Hoover declared war on the mob,” remembered William Roemer, a field agent who installed a wiretap dubbed “Little Al” in the headquarters of the Chicago Outfit.
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