The Mafia's Greatest Hits

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Organised crime came to North America from Sicily in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. The methods and culture originated in southern Italy and arrived in the New York boroughs of Italian Harlem, the Lower East Side and Brooklyn when waves of Italian immigrants were displaced from their homes in Europe after Mussolini began clamping down on the Mafia families.

While New York remained one of the hotbeds of organised crime on the continent, many mob bosses moved to Chicago in the 1920s, and the city is still home to several criminal families (the word family is used even when the groups aren’t blood relatives). The Mafia dominates criminal activities from counterfeiting, robbery, bribery, fraud and human trafficking to gunrunning, gambling, extortion, prostitution and murder. Al Capone rose to power in Chicago during Prohibition as there was an enormous amount of money to be made selling bootlegged liquor. This led to fierce battles between crime syndicates as they vied to control alcohol distribution.

Capone’s men eventually massacred the North Side Gang and took over in Chicago. In New York, two rival families emerged but Salvatore Maranzano had Joe Masseria killed and then declared himself leader of the American Mafia. He established a code of conduct and divided the city into spheres of influence governed by five families, each of which paid him a tribute. This didn’t sit well with Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano so he had Maranzano eliminated.

When Prohibition ended in 1933, the criminal families expanded into unions, construction and drug trafficking. Luciano then set up the Commission, which invited important local bosses to vote on criminal matters and solve disputes between families. This National Crime Syndicate brought peace to the warring factions by allowing them to work their own territories without fear of encroachment by rival gangs. It wasn’t long before the families had their fingers in hundreds of legitimate businesses – particularly construction and shipping – although they then extorted money, raided pension schemes and stole goods from the ports.

Al Capone in 1931

The Cuban casino industry was particularly lucrative but Fidel Castro overthrew President Fulgencio Batista during the revolution in the 1950s and then banned American investment on the island. This forced the Mafia to look elsewhere for their gambling fix and they homed in on Las Vegas. Hundreds of millions of dollars went into building new casinos in the desert but the Mafia skimmed an equivalent amount of cash from the winnings.

Law enforcement agencies in North America still knew virtually nothing about the criminal organisation, but their time in the shadows was drawing to a close. In 1957, New York police arrested 60 crime figures after an underworld conference and details about the Mafia began to emerge. Joe Valachi then revealed its existence to the FBI, which brought the Mafia to the attention of one of the most powerful families in America: the Kennedys.

In the late 1950s, JFK and his brother, Robert, began clamping down on organised crime. They targeted three Mafia families in particular: Sam Giancana, Godfather of the Chicago area; Johnny Roselli in Las Vegas and Hollywood; and Santo Trafficante Junior in Tampa, who maintained ties with the Cuban underworld and worked closely with Louisiana kingpin Carlos Marcello.

Salvatore Maranzano

Marcello concerned the Kennedys because he had been born in Tunisia (so was not a citizen) and had taken over the New Orleans crime syndicate. In 1959, he appeared before the senate committee investigating organised crime but he invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer their questions. The following year, Marcello donated half a million dollars to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign fund so he could run against JFK.

Fidel Castro in 1959

When he realised he couldn’t indict Marcello, Robert Kennedy pressured the immigration authorities to deport him. The CIA abducted and handcuffed him, then bundled him onto an aircraft and forced him to parachute into Central America. Marcello was seething at the apparent loss of dignity so he hired David Ferrie to fly him back into the United States two weeks later. On April 4, 1961 Marcello was arrested again and deported to Guatemala, which he claimed was the country of his birth. He had returned to Louisiana within two weeks, however.

By 1962, Marcello had made several threats against Robert Kennedy: A dog will still bite you if you cut off its tail, and JFK: If you cut off the dog’s head, the tail will no longer wag. He then told private investigator Edwin Becker that he would have the president killed by a patsy who would take the fall.

There were conflicts of interest, however. These same crime bosses wanted their Cuban casino businesses back so they were now working with the CIA to overthrow Castro (they apparently failed 17 times to eliminate him). The embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs invasion gave Castro the excuse to form an alliance with the Russians and bring the Cold War to the West.

The Kennedys decided to change tack and overthrow Castro from within, using his close advisor Juan Almeida to manage the transition under the codename Amworld. A Special Group was set up by Bobby and included Edward Lansdale (Assistant Secretary of