The World's Most Evil Gangs (2 page)

O’Bannion next tried his hand at robbery but after being arrested for a safecracking job he went to work in the more convivial environment of the city’s dive bars, where his speciality was drugging patrons’ drinks and then robbing them
when they passed out. As part of this scam, joke-cracking O’Bannion also did stints as a singing waiter in a nightclub that was frequented by criminals. They found the entertainer so engaging that they helped him set up in big-time business for himself. He ran his operation from a flower shop, the grandest in Chicago, catering for the city’s high society weddings and funerals. But his core moneymaking trade was in illicit brewing and distilling.

O’Bannion had style and principles. Unlike his Italian rivals in neighbouring parts of Chicago, the Irishman would not allow brothels in his area and refused to sell any but the
best-quality
booze. He sneered at the crudity of the Mafia gangsters but in 1924 he cracked his most costly joke at their expense. He sold Johnny Torrio a half-share in a brewery for half a million dollars – without revealing to Torrio he’d been tipped off that it was about to be raided. O’Bannion ensured he had an alibi when the police swooped but Torrio, who had been careful to avoid any police record, was booked. Revenge was swift and bloody.

Three hoodlums working for Torrio and Capone dropped into O’Bannion’s shop to buy a wreath. The ‘joke’ being played on the Irishman was that the wreath was for himself. One of the thugs held the Irishman down while the others shot him dead. O’Bannion’s funeral was attended by Chicago’s richest and most influential citizens, as well as murderers, thieves and bootleggers. No one stinted on the wreaths, said to have cost over $50,000.

O’Bannion’s gang, including the notorious George ‘Bugs’ Moran and Hymie Weiss, now went on the attack, ambushing Torrio as he returned home from a shopping trip. The hitmen gunned him down, shooting him in the jaw, lungs, groin, legs,
and abdomen. Moran tried to deliver the coup de grâce into Torrio’s skull but ran out of ammunition and he miraculously survived. After recovering in hospital, Torrio was picked up by the police and jailed for nine months over the illicit brewery. On his release, he fled Chicago in 1925 with a reputed $50 million and with Moran and Weiss still on his trail, and settled in his family’s hometown, Naples. He returned to New York in 1928 and worked an enforcer for Mob mastermind Meyer Lansky (of whom much more in the next chapter) until being jailed again for tax evasion. He died of a heart attack in 1967.

Capone was now master of the richest territory in the underworld, running a thriving empire in prostitution, bootlegging, gambling and extortion, but he had started a gangland war that he could not finish. Before the Twenties were out, more than 1,000 bodies were to end up on the streets of Chicago in a string of bloody reprisal raids. And one of the earliest was against ‘Scarface’ himself.

Capone’s headquarters was the Hawthorn Hotel in the wholly corrupt Chicago suburb of Cicero. From there he ran his $5 million-a-year business in the most flamboyant manner, playing host to the city’s louche glitterati, from politicians to showgirls. In September 1926 ‘Bugs’ Moran and Hymie Weiss, having failed to settle their score with Johnny Torrio, led a motorcade past the Hawthorn Hotel and sprayed it with hundreds of submachine-gun bullets. Capone was unhurt but his pride was ruffled and he had Weiss gunned down in the street shortly afterwards.

Moran proved more elusive so, while maintaining a price on his head, Capone turned to other business matters that needed settling. The Genna family, a gang of six Sicilian brothers, led by ‘Bloody’ Angelo, were established suppliers of ‘medical
quality’ alcohol. Both Capone and Moran wanted to muscle in on their business and one by one their gang members were gunned down until the remaining brothers fled the city.

Capone then turned on one of his own men, Francesco ‘Frankie’ Yale, one of the hitmen hired to assassinate ‘Deanie’ O’Bannion. Suspecting Yale had short-changed him on a liquor deal, he was lured to a fake appointment in New York in 1928 and machine-gunned to death from a passing car. Back in Chicago that same year, an attack by unknown assailants also gunned down ‘Diamond’ Joe Esposito, another hoodlum who had become a bent politician controlling police, politicians and union leaders.

The next obstacle to Capone’s monopoly of power in the West Side of Chicago was another bootleg liquor supplier, Roger Touhy. As a means of driving him out of business, Capone in 1931 kidnapped his partner, Matt Kolb, and when Touhy paid the $50,000 ransom demanded for his release, shot him anyway. When Touhy still held out against Capone, the gangster got corrupt police to frame him for a separate kidnapping and he was jailed on perjured evidence. Days after his release, he was shot dead in a Chicago street.

But to Al ‘Scarface’ Capone, the sweetest act of revenge was always going to be the elimination of his most hated opponent, George Clarence ‘Bugs’ Moran, the O’Bannion aide who had tried to kill Capone’s old partner Johnny Torrio in 1924. For the task, Capone employed his deadliest hitmen to enact what would become the most infamous gang shoot-out of all time – the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929.

On a snow-covered Chicago morning, men in police uniforms burst into a garage used by Moran’s North Side Gang. Seven of his men, who had gathered to await a liquor delivery,
were lined up against a wall. The fake cops then motioned to the Mafia executioners just outside. Machine guns spat death.

Neither Capone, who was vacationing in Miami at the time, nor Moran, were in the garage that morning, the latter only narrowly missing his assassination. But six Mob associates and a car mechanic were killed. It was a massacre at the height of the Chicago Mob wars that shocked a nation already accustomed to headlines announcing random street killings. It also shook Moran himself, who fled town, leaving the ‘Windy City’ to Capone.

The actual hit is thought to have been organised, and possibly carried out, by one of his most trusted lieutenants, Vincenzo DeMora, who liked to be known as ‘Machine Gun’ Jack McGurn and sidekick Anthony ‘Joe Batters’ Accardo. McGurn, who had joined Capone as a hired gunman after his father was killed by the Genna family, had a fearsome reputation. By 1929 at least 25 bodies had been found with his ‘calling card’, a nickel coin pressed into the palm of the victim’s hand. His fees for contract killings allowed him to buy shares in a number of Chicago clubs. In 1927 when a comedian, Joe E. Lewis, refused to work at one of them, he was beaten up by McGurn and had his vocal cords cut. McGurn himself was machine-gunned to death by three masked executioners in a bowling alley in 1936, seven years and a day after the St Valentine’s Day Massacre.

McGurn’s sidekick, Anthony ‘Joe Batters’ Accardo, went on to succeed Capone as head of the Chicago Mafia. In old age, he gave way to Sam Giancana (of whom, much more in a further chapter).

McGurn’s killers were never traced but the prime suspect was ‘Bugs’ Moran. He largely disappeared from public view after
his men were massacred and it was not until 1946 that he resurfaced in Ohio, where he was jailed for bank robbery. Shortly after his release in 1956, he was again caught after robbing a bank. He died in Leavenworth prison in 1957.

After forcing Moran to flee for his life following the 1929 massacre, Capone had taken over control of the entire criminal network of the city of Chicago. But his empire would soon crumble. In 1931 what the police failed to achieve in a decade the taxman managed in a few weeks. On 4 October after a speedy trial, Al Capone was found guilty of tax evasion. He was fined $50,000 and ordered to pay $30,000 costs – chickenfeed to him. But he was also sentenced to a jail term of 11 years. It broke him.

When he was released in 1939, Capone was already sliding into insanity from syphilis. He hid himself away on his Florida estate, shunned by neighbours and even his fellow Mafia veterans until his death, alone and deranged, in 1947. The new breed of Mob leaders wanted nothing to do with the
loud-mouthed
, brutish scar-faced relic of a blood-spattered era.

A
young Polish immigrant was walking through the streets of New York when he saw a girl being assaulted by two men. The 16-year-old rushed to her rescue, fists flying. In the ensuing fight, police were called and all three men were arrested and kept in prison for 48 days. Their brief incarceration changed their lives. The girl’s two attackers were young thugs ‘Lucky’ Luciano and ‘Bugsy’ Siegel. The plucky teenager was Meyer Lansky. Despite his attack on them, the thugs took Lansky under their wing … and all three went on to become Mob magnates.

Well, it’s a nice story. (And even as an author of crime books, I also once believed it.) But like so many myths about the Mafia, it paints a glamorised picture of what is, in stark truth, a grimy, grubby, barbaric criminal subculture. There are no ‘Robin Hoods’ in the ongoing history of the Mafia, only hoodlums and their manipulative masters, the Mob bosses.

Take ‘Lucky’ Luciano, who liked to think of himself as a heroic wartime agent for the US government. In fact, his real name was Salvatore Lucania, Sicilian-born pimp and drug pusher who was a bully and cheat almost from birth. ‘Bugsy’ Siegel – so nicknamed because he was ‘as crazy as a bedbug’ – presented himself as a handsome playboy, who mixed with Hollywood’s rich and famous. But Benjamin Siegel was really a nasty thug and cheap chiseller who, when entrusted with millions of dollars to run his own business, stole from his friends. Seemingly self-effacing Meyer Lansky was, to all appearances, a polite, mild-mannered businessman. But the bent accountant, born Maier Suchowjansky, was as guilty as any of the murderous mobsters who worked for him – a cynical mover of money earned from the vilest criminal undertakings that cost untold lives.

The story is true, however, that Luciano and Lansky met early in life. Born in Sicily in 1897, Luciano arrived in the United States in 1906 and got into trouble within hours of disembarking from his migrant ship – for stealing fruit from a handcart. The following year the ten-year-old was charged with his first crime, shoplifting. He also launched his first racket, charging Jewish kids a penny or two for his ‘protection’ to and from school. If they refused to pay, he would beat them up. In 1915 his life of petty crime led him to a custodial sentence for the first time for drug peddling but his year in reform school left him a hardened criminal. Luciano became a leader of Manhattan’s Five Points Gang and police named him as a suspect in several local murders although he was never indicted. Fellow members of the gang at various times were Johnny Torrio and Al Capone.

Meyer Lansky, born in 1902 to a Russian family, arrived in
the US in 1911 and was one of the Jewish kids that Luciano targeted, offering him protection at a price. Lansky refused to pay, and after Luciano failed to beat him up they became friends. Like his Italian pal, Lansky formed his own small gang while still in his teens, mainly involved in gambling and car theft. Luciano was at first Lansky’s mentor and later his associate. They controlled a number of New York gangs, mainly Italian and Irish, involved in robbing homes, shops and warehouses. But there was an area of crime in which Luciano specialised and which Lansky abhorred: prostitution. The Jew would have no part in the vice trade because, while a teenager, he had fallen desperately in love with a young prostitute, then found her one night in an alley with her throat cut, probably by her pimp.

Between 1918 and 1932, Lansky was arrested seven times on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to murder but he had to be released on each one because of lack of witnesses. Luciano was more successful in keeping out of police custody. He and Lansky had both become affiliated to the gang of Jacob ‘Little Augie’ Orgen, who made a fortune from union and organised labour rackets. On Orgen’s behalf, Luciano became New York’s most feared hitman, whose favoured weapon was an ice pick. His reward was a string of Manhattan brothels that, by the Twenties, were estimated to be earning him more than $1 million a year.

While Luciano was the epitome of a brutal gangster, Lansky took the softly-softly approach. Seeing how fellow Jews were intimidated by their Irish and Italian neighbours, he began offering their businesses ‘protection’ – at a price. But he needed ‘muscle’ to make his racket work, and the first person Meyer recruited was fellow Brooklyn boy Benjamin Siegel, also of
Russian Jewish descent, though born in New York in 1906. Siegel had already devised his own protection racket, forcing Manhattan pushcart merchants to pay him a dollar or he would incinerate their merchandise. From his teenage years, the tough thug was building a criminal record that included armed robbery, rape and murder.

Siegel, Meyer and Luciano formed a firm friendship, reinforced when Siegel saved Lansky from beatings and when Lansky helped Luciano organise his rackets to the best financial advantage without interference from the tax authorities. It could hardly be said they were ‘life-long’ friends, however, for two of them would end up sending a hitman to ‘rub out’ the third. But the years following the World War One were boom times for the trio.

Their key to untold riches came on 17 January 1920. When the Prohibition law banning alcohol was introduced, the trio went into the bootleg booze business big-time, teaming up with tommy gun wielding thugs to ensure a constant supply of illicit alcohol to New York. Principal among their associates in the northern states was Alfonso Capone, who was fiercely loyal to Lansky and Luciano.

In 1927 the evil duo were joined by a third ruthless killer and future crime czar, Vito Genovese. Born in Naples in 1897, Genovese had been a friend and neighbour of Luciano since the former’s arrival in New York. A petty thief with only one arrest, for carrying a revolver, he too had graduated to organised crime while working under contract to Jacob Orgen. Despite the combined reputations of Lansky, Luciano and Genovese, the gang of three were still not the most powerful mobsters in New York. That accolade was being fought for between two old-style Mafia leaders, Salvatore Maranzano and Giuseppe Masseria,
bitter rivals whose territorial battles had left as many as 60 of their ‘soldiers’ shot dead in a single year.

Individually, both Maranzano and Masseria tried to woo Luciano, Lansky and Genovese into their organisations, probably fearful of the trio’s growing power. They refused. By way of persuasion, Maranzano lured Luciano to an empty garage, where a dozen masked men lay in wait. Maranzano had him strung up by his thumbs from the rafters and punched and kicked until he lost consciousness. Luciano was repeatedly revived so that the torture could continue anew. Finally, Maranzano slashed him across the face with a knife. The wound required 55 stitches.

Unsurprisingly, Luciano told his tormentor that he had changed his mind and was now happy to join his Mob. Maranzano relented and offered him a role as his associate – but only if he would first dispose of his Mafia rival, Masseria. With little choice in the matter, Luciano agreed. In April 1931 he approached Masseria, pretending that he was now keen to join forces with him, and invited the Mafioso for a meal. They sealed the deal and toasted one another across the table at his favourite restaurant, Nuova Villa Tammaro, on Coney Island. When Luciano retired to the bathroom, four gunmen burst in. Masseria must have known his fate the moment he saw them. They were Vito Genovese, Bugsy Siegel and two other Lansky men, Albert Anastasia and Joe Adonis. Masseria was cut down in a hail of bullets as he tried to flee the restaurant.

Salvatore Maranzano was delighted with the result and paid due tribute to Lansky and Luciano for their handiwork. The 63-year-old Mafia boss could now claim to be the first true Godfather. After Masseria’s death, this elegantly dressed
Sicilian, who had once trained to become a priest, called a meeting of the New York families in a hall where the walls were hung with crucifixes and other religious emblems. He drew up a constitution in which he proclaimed himself the effective ‘Capo di Tutti Capi’ of what he termed ‘La Cosa Nostra’.

These and other terms that are such an intrinsic part of the Mafia vocabulary were becoming familiar to the American public for the first time. Luciano and Genovese used this Mafia patois and their Jewish cohorts Lansky and Siegel were also fluent in it. But despite the traditional Cosa Nostra oaths of fidelity they all expressed, loyalty was not their strong point. The new Capo di Tutti Capi, Salvatore Maranzano, was the man who stood between the Luciano gang and the pinnacle of power in the US underworld. And in September 1931 Luciano settled his old score with him.

One morning four ‘tax inspectors’ called at Maranzano’s real estate agency on Park Avenue. His bodyguards kept their guns hidden as the four identified themselves as Internal Revenue Service investigators and demanded to see the books and the boss. Ushered in to his private office, they revealed themselves as ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, Albert Anastasia, Red Levine and Thomas ‘Three Fingers’ Lucchese. All four drew knives. Just five months after pronouncing himself Godfather, Maranzano was killed – stabbed several times and then shot for good measure. Over the next few days about 40 more of Maranzano’s team and their associates were systematically eliminated.

The new Mob magnates were now firmly in power. Luciano became the Boss of Bosses. His predecessor, Maranzano, had very conveniently formed the La Cosa Nostra code of conduct, set up ‘family’ divisions and structure, and established procedures for resolving disputes. Luciano now instituted the
‘National Crime Syndicate’, consisting of the major Mob bosses from around the country and the so-called ‘Five Families’ of New York. The Syndicate was meant to serve as a deliberative body to solve disputes, carve up and distribute territories and regulate lucrative illegal activities. The solely Italian-American Mafia had their own body, known as ‘the Commission’, which ruled all La Cosa Nostra activities.

In this way, by the early Thirties, the old-style trigger-happy Mafia leaders, derisively termed ‘Moustache Petes’, had largely been replaced. The Syndicate of crime families brought in accountants and corporate executives. They still needed those ultimate persuaders, the hired killers, but, in order to show the authorities that the Mob had cleaned up its act, the assassins operated at arm’s-length from the men in suits. Thus, under Luciano’s aegis, while one wing of the operation was labelled the National Crime Syndicate, the other became known in the press as ‘Murder Incorporated’.

The most feared hitman of this mercenary death squad was Albert Anastasia, one of the killers of both Masseria and Maranzano. Known as New York’s ‘Lord High Executioner’, he was founder member of Murder Inc., appointed by Luciano as a reward for his loyalty, along with second-in-command, union racketeer Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter. Together, they meted out death on contract for a quarter of a century.

Their ‘soldiers’, sometimes known as the ‘Brownsville Boys’, were predominantly Jewish and Italian killers who operated out of the back room of an innocent-looking candy store called Midnight Rose’s, in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighbourhood. The shop was owned by Louis Capone, no relation to Chicago’s Alphonse Capone but still a thoroughly nasty killer. From this base, Murder Inc. is estimated to have carried out between 900
and 1,000 gangland murders in the New York City area. Throughout this period, their boss, Albert Anastasia, remained largely untouchable, his business card claiming that he was a sales representative for a company called the Convertible Mattress Corporation.

Anastasia, born Umberto Anastasio in southern Italy in 1902, had arrived in New York illegaly just after World War One, jumping ship and taking a job on the Brooklyn waterfront. In 1921 he was sentenced to death for the muder of a fellow docker – but, when retried on a technicality, he had to be freed because all the witnesses had mysteriously disappeared. In 1928, by which time Anastasia had become a union leader in the corrupt Longshoremen’s International Association, he was charged with a murder in Brooklyn – and again freed when the witnesses either disappeared or refused to testify. In 1932 he was indicted on charges of murdering another man with an ice pick – but the case was dropped due to lack of witnesses. The following year he was charged with yet another killing – but again there were no witnesses willing to testify.

Anastasia’s more high-profile ‘contracts’ included the murder of top trucking union official Morris Diamond in 1939. That same year he organised the murder of Pietro Panto, an activisit trying to expose corruption in the
25,000-member
Longshoremen’s union. When Panto refused to take a bribe to desist from his campaign against the intimidation and violence that kept the union’s members in line, he was kidnapped, brutally battered, then strangled. His body was later recovered on a farm known to be a Murder Inc. dumping ground in New Jersey.

Murder Inc. finally over-reached itself in 1941. A gun-
for-hire
gangster named Abe Reles was arrested on murder charges
and admitted that he had been supplying Anastasia and Buchalter with hitmen for the past ten years. To save himself from the death penalty, Reles offered tesimony that put seven members of Murder Inc. in prison. He also offered information that could implicate Anastasia in the slayings of Diamond and Panto.

Fearful of prosecution, Anastasia offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who would ‘rub out’ Reles. In November 1941, the ‘squealer’ was being guarded by police at a Coney Island hotel during an ongoing trial. Despite his police guard, Reles was found dead on an adjacent restaurant roof. An official inquiry ruled that he had accidentally died while climbing down the building using knotted sheets.

Most New Yorkers, however, firmly believed that Anastasia had had Reles murdered – a view reinforced the following year when another informer was found dead. Like Reles, a Murder Inc. associate named Anthony Romeo had been arrested and was willing to implicate Anastasia in several murders. However, in June 1942 his body was discovered in Delaware. He had been beaten before being shot several times.

The silencing of informers was very much in Murder Inc.’s interests but the removal of unco-operative criminal cohorts or commercial rivals was also a money-making activity. It was, as the character Don Corleone says in Mario Puzo’s novel
The Godfather,
‘not personal – it’s strictly business’. Those gory bits of ‘business’ might often be ordered by – but seldom if ever witnessed by – the Mob leader who always maintained a low profile, Meyer Lansky.