Читать книгу The Rise of the Mafia - Martin Short - Страница 14

When the Mafia turned up once again in American police files nobody gave it a name. On 6 December 1928 at the Statler Hotel in Cleveland police arrested twenty-one men from six states. Most of them were armed and they were each fined $50. All were Sicilians. No Cleveland policeman seems to have known of the existence of a crime confederation, nor did the police forces of the cities from which most of the mobsters came (Cleveland, Chicago, New York and St Louis) pool their knowledge. Outside the New York Police no one gathered or analyzed ‘criminal intelligence’. America had to wait almost thirty years before a dedicated state trooper proved that there was a Mafia and that it operated from coast to coast.

For thirteen years Sergeant Edgar Croswell of the New York State Police had stalked Joseph Barbara, a businessmen much respected in Endicott, a town 150 miles north-west of New York City. Barbara owned a Canada Dry bottling plant but Croswell realized that this was no ordinary soft drinks’ salesman when he learned Barbara had taken over the plant by intimidating the previous owner. He also found out that Barbara had twice been cleared of attempted murder in nearby Pennsylvania. In one case a dying man claimed Barbara had shot him. Much to his surprise the victim recovered. He recanted his testimony, leaving Barbara in the clear.

On 13 November 1957 Sergeant Croswell and another trooper were investigating a dud cheque at a local motel when they spotted Jo Barbara Jun., the old gangster’s son, making reservations for a Canada Dry convention. The troopers thought this odd so they visited the Barbara home just outside the village of Apalachin. There they checked the number plates on visitors’ cars and found out that the cars belonged not to soft drinks salesmen but to hoodlums.

Early next day Croswell took several detectives back to the house where they found many more limousines. They were taking down licence numbers when suddenly men swarmed out of the house and scattered in all directions, some into cars and others into the woods. There was only one road out so Croswell’s men set up a roadblock. They identified the passengers in the first car and let it through but then decided to take everyone else to the police station and check them out with their home-town police.

Croswell was tickled by the high fashion in which the men had dressed for their trip to the country: tailored suits, grey fedoras and pointed embroidered shoes. Most of them had Italian accents. Several could speak no English. They said they had come to see their old friend Joe Barbara because he was sick. Croswell could not prove they were lying. Merely by meeting together they had not broken the law. They were not even carrying guns so they all had to be released.

At first Croswell had no real idea who these people were or why they were all at Barbara’s. He soon realized that he had broken up a meeting of the warlords of organized crime, the leaders of the Mafia in America. Most of their names meant little to him and nothing at all to most detectives, but they were some of the most powerful and violent criminals in the nation. As Croswell later found out the men were ‘14-carat hoodlums. Strictly lived by breaking the law, preying on honest people, taking over businesses, killing each other, killing other people that got in their way.’

Top of the list was Vito Genovese, the most powerful mafioso in New York. Born in Naples in 1897, he had fled to Italy from America in 1937 to avoid a murder charge. He spent most of the Second World War close to Mussolini but when the Allies reached Naples in 1943 he turned up in the service of the Allied military governor of Italy. Genovese worked as his most trusted interpreter at the same time as he controlled the huge black market. He developed a remarkably effective way of keeping the rackets to himself by exposing rival thieves to his employers, from whom he himself was stealing. Despite his position he was arrested for black-market activities and taken back to New York in 1945 to face the murder charge he had fled eight years earlier.1

Suddenly the main witness was murdered. Genovese was free again in New York just in time to take over from his compare, Lucky Luciano. Born in Sicily, Luciano had built up the most powerful crime syndicate in America. His career was interrupted when he spent ten years in jail for controlling prostitution and was deported to Italy in 1946 (see Chapter 14). His organization was steadily taken over by Genovese and in 1957 the Mafia chieftains met at Apalachin partly to anoint him Il Capo di Tutti Capi, ‘boss of bosses’. It was Genovese who overturned the Mafia’s formal ban on drug-trafficking. Not that anyone had ever observed it – least of all Genovese.

Also at Apalachin were Joe Profaci and his brother-in-law, Joe Magliocco. Born within nine months of each other in Villabate, Sicily they had come to America in the 1920s. In 1957 they claimed to be legitimate businessmen in olive oil, liquor and the garment industry. In reality they led another powerful Mafia faction.

Other Sicilians visiting Barbara were ‘labour consultant’ Carlo Gambino and his brother-in-law, Paul Castellano, probably the most powerful man in New York’s wholesale meat business. Only three weeks earlier Gambino had taken over the criminal organization of Albert Anastasia, shot to death in a barber’s chair in New York’s Park Sheraton Hotel. On the Apalachin agenda was the belated ratification of old Albert’s murder.

Also at Apalachin were two more Sicilian-born New York bosses, Joe Bonanno of Brooklyn and Vinnie Rao of Italian East Harlem. New York City dominated the Apalachin summit but there were top mafiosi from upstate New York, from Philadelphia and north-east Pennsylvania, from Boston, Cleveland, Kansas City, from New Jersey, Illinois, Texas, Colorado, California and even Havana.

Sixty-two Italian-American mobsters are known to have gathered at Apalachin. Forty more may have got away or had not arrived by the time Croswell struck. It was the largest mob gathering ever discovered by American police and it would be the last meeting of its size. Never again would the Mafia risk so humiliating a capture. Twenty men were convicted of obstructing justice. They were cleared on appeal but their real conviction was by the media. After more than sixty years’ argument over whether the Mafia really existed in America the Mafia itself had supplied the proof.

Yet even Apalachin failed to reveal the structure of the Mafia. ‘At the time,’ says Ed Croswell today, ‘there was no such thing as organized-crime charts or rosters of families or even family heads. They were just known as hoodlums in their own communities. The state of intelligence was very unsophisticated. You didn’t have computer checks where you can get information in three minutes. Then it would take you days – you would probably never get it – it would get lost in the files or the mail. Each individual policeman who was interested in organized crime was a voice in the wilderness and that worked both ways: there was nobody to listen and he didn’t know what he was talking about.’

After Apalachin many ‘experts’ emerged, most of whom certainly did not know what they were talking about. The most coherent interpretation came from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Its main witness at New York State’s subsequent inquiry was John Cusack. Looking back twenty-five years he says that Apalachin was ‘a bombshell’ in that it proved conclusively that some form of organization did exist. Yet, ‘We didn’t know with precision the existence of the five families of New York. We knew there were affiliations but we had conflicting information as to who was who in the organization. We talked to one informant and he would describe Tommy ‘Three Fingers’ Brown [Tommy Lucchese] as the head of the Mafia in New York. Someone else would tell us it was Frank Costello, another informant would absolutely swear it was Joe Bonanno or Joe Profaci or Vincent Mangano. We later learned that each informer was telling us that their man was the head of a family, which to them meant being head of the Mafia.’

The first mafioso to turn public informer and betray the true structure of the Mafia in America was Joseph Valachi, a thirty-year veteran of organized crime. Serving twenty years for narcotics in Atlanta Penitentiary, he became convinced that his Mafia boss, Vito Genovese, had given him the kiss of death. Genovese, who by this time was also in Atlanta for a narcotics offence, ordered another inmate to kill him. Valachi mistook another prisoner for his would-be assassin and clubbed him to death. When he realized he had killed the wrong man he became so consumed with fear and remorse that he turned government witness and informed on the Mafia. Ironically it was only because Genovese wrongly believed Valachi already to be an informer that he decided to have him killed. That at least was Valachi’s story.

In September 1963 Valachi began to testify before the US Senate Permanent Sub-committee On Investigations. His account of the structure and history of an organization which he called not the Mafia but ‘La Cosa Nostra’ – ‘Our Thing’ or ‘Our Family’ – was breathtaking.

Valachi revealed that the Mafia was not a loose confederation of mobsters working under a few big shots but a structured army of ‘families’, each ruling organized crime in their respective cities. Only one city had more than one crime family: New York which had five. Valachi identified these families by the names of their leaders at the time: Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Tommy Lucchese, Joe Magliocco and Joe Bonanno. Valachi revealed that the head of each La Cosa Nostra family is called the ‘boss’. Under him is the ‘under-boss’. Equal with the under-boss is the ‘consigliere’, a counsellor or adviser to the boss who is also the family’s representative at large. Beneath the under-boss are ‘caporegimes’ – captains or lieutenants who each command a crew of ‘soldiers’. Although soldiers hold the lowest rank in the family, they are often major criminals in their own right and may be worth millions of dollars.

At the top of this pyramid is the ‘National Commission’. In Valachi’s day all the most powerful bosses in the country were on the Commission but he was not sure who they were. He assumed all the New York bosses were members. Attorney-General Robert Kennedy told the senators that the ‘national crime syndicate’ was headed by a commission of nine to twelve members. It made policy decisions, settled disputes and allocated territories and businesses between the families. Later the FBI stated there were twenty-five to twenty-seven crime families across America, each structured in the way Valachi had disclosed. Nationwide there were between 2000 and 5000 ‘made men’ who had ten times as many professional criminal associates.

Valachi explained that he had joined La Cosa Nostra in 1930 in a ritual identical to that written down by Palermo Police Commissioner Alongi in 1886. Thirty-five high-ranking members had assembled in a large room in upstate New York into which the novitiates were summoned one by one. ‘When I came in they were at the edge of a long table and there was a gun and a knife on the table. They sat me down at the edge of the table with Maranzano [the boss] doing the talking. I repeated some words they told me, but I couldn’t explain what he meant. I could repeat the words but they were in Italian, Sicilian. Maranzano went on to explain that they lived by the gun and by the knife and you die by the gun and by the knife.

‘Then he gave me a piece of paper and I was to burn it … the piece of paper is burning, and it is lighted and in your hand, you say – again they give you words in Italian but I knew what it meant – “This is the way I burn if I expose this organization.”’

Then a godfather to be responsible for Valachi was chosen at random. It was Joe Bonanno who would still be boss of one of New York’s families when Valachi testified thirty-three years later. ‘The godfather pricks your finger with a needle and he makes a little blood come out. That is the expression, the blood relationship. It is supposed to be like brothers. Then everybody gets up and shakes hands and they say a few more words together, also in Italian. I never bothered finding out what it meant. I had an idea: we are all tied up – we are all together.’

Valachi also revealed the code with which one member introduces another. If someone is in La Cosa Nostra he is introduced as ‘a friend of ours’. If not, he is introduced as a ‘a friend of mine’. To prevent conflict over each other’s women no member may violate the wife, sisters or daughters of another member.

Valachi then spoke of the fate that awaited him: ‘Can I say something? What I am telling you, what I am exposing to you and to the press and everybody. This is my doom. This is the promise I am breaking. Even if I talked I should never talk about this.’

The Genovese family to which he had belonged had 450 to 500 members. Gambino’s family was about the same size. Valachi did not know everyone in his family. As a soldier he belonged to a ‘regime’ of only thirty members. In Sicily the regime had evolved to improve secrecy and limit damage if a member turned informer. Yet at the Senate hearings Valachi named hundreds of members. He identified all but ten of 141 Genovese members displayed on a huge chart. He also identified members of all the other New York families, claiming to know 289 out of 338 mafiosi on all five family charts. Single-handed he had blown La Cosa Nostra wide open. Twenty years on John Cusack said of his testimony: ‘Valachi for the first time, in a very organized way, answered all our questions…. He gave us a perfect understanding of the Mafia organization in America.’

Joe had known a lot about the Mafia from the moment he joined. In 1930 the New York crime families were fighting a civil war. They needed new members as gunmen. Valachi said that between forty and sixty men had been killed in fourteen months although the Senate investigators could confirm only a few of these. All these cases were still ‘active’, an oddly dynamic word to describe murders unsolved for thirty years. Valachi gave precise accounts of the murders in which he had been directly involved. What he said was confirmed by what was still on file in New York police files. Either he was telling the truth or he had been brilliantly coached.

According to Valachi the war was fought over who should control the New York underworld. In 1930 the principal warriors were two Sicilians: Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria from Trapani and Salvatore Maranzano from Castellamare del Golfo. Joe Masseria was the better established, having come to America many years earlier. An unprepossessing figure of a man, he was now New York’s biggest bootlegger and controlled many leading non-Italian racketeers. In contrast, Maranzano had arrived in America in the 1920s and was already over 50. In his home town he was a Mafia boss. When he came to America he assumed the leadership of all the mafiosi from Castellamare who were already there or who arrived soon after. They included Joe Profaci, Joe Bonanno and Carlo Gambino. Masseria felt threatened by this rapidly growing clan and condemned all Castellamarese to death.

On 26 February 1930 Masseria struck his first blow by ordering the murder of Tom Reina, a boss allied to Maranzano. Tom Gagliano now took over Reina’s family, inducting Valachi with Maranzano’s participation. Gagliano was not from Castellamare but he shared Castellamarese hatred of Masseria.

They now struck back by killing several of Masseria’s top men. He lost face and his supporters began to desert. He sued for peace and offered to work as a soldier if Maranzano would spare him. Maranzano refused. Masseria thought he could still survive with the help of some of his able ‘Young Turks’, notably Vito Genovese and Lucky Luciano. On 15 April 1931 he went to a restaurant in Coney Island to meet Luciano, Genovese and Ciro Terranova, the ‘Artichoke King’. But Masseria’s underlings had set him up. As he sat down he was shot six times in the back and the head. His murder was never solved.

Maranzano blossomed like the Roman emperors he so admired. He summoned a meeting to announce his peace terms. Valachi was there. ‘It was around Washington Avenue in the Bronx. There were about 400 to 500 people in this big hall. Maranzano was standing on the platform when he got up to speak. He explained about Masseria and his groups killing people without just cause.

‘“Now it is going to be different,” he said. “First, we are going to have the boss of all bosses, which is myself. Then we have the boss and then we have an under-boss under the boss. Then we have the caporegima.” He explained all the rules.’

Maranzano explained that the soldiers would now be divided between Gagliano and himself. Valachi chose to go with Maranzano for whom he had already carried out murders. Maranzano then held a banquet lasting five nights at which gangsters gave $115,000 in tribute to the self-styled boss of bosses. The money was not all for Maranzano. His soldiers were each meant to get a share. Despite his loyalty, Valachi lamented, ‘I never got a nickel out of that, senator.’

Valachi worked for Maranzano from his office on Park Avenue. Aggrieved though he was about the money, he still trusted his boss to look after him. One day he found Luciano and Genovese with Maranzano. Not long after the boss told him, ‘We have to go to the mattress again.’ Valachi explained to the senators. ‘The “mattress” means we have to go back to war. He told me he can’t get along with Charlie and Vito. He gave me a list. “We have to get rid of these people.” On the list: Al Capone, Frank Costello, Charley Lucky, Vito Genovese, Vincent Mangano, Joe Adonis, Dutch Schultz. These are all important names at the time.’

The next day, 10 September 1932, Maranzano was to meet Luciano and Genovese again at his office. Valachi told him not to risk his life but Maranzano ignored his advice. The meeting was fixed for two o’clock. At 1.45 p.m. Valachi called him and was told all was well, so he took the day off and drove to Brooklyn with a friend to see two girls. In the early hours he returned to Manhattan and went home to Italian Harlem. Then he happened to open the newspaper only to see the headline, ‘Park Avenue Murder’. Maranzano had been killed in his office that afternoon.

Valachi later discovered how Maranzano had died. Four Jews posing as policemen had gone to the office. A crowd of people were waiting there, each hoping to see Maranzano. The ‘cops’ flashed their badges. Two stayed with the crowd. The other two went with Maranzano into the other room. Suddenly he realized they had come to kill him. He went for his pistol but they shot him first and then stabbed him four times in the abdomen. According to Valachi one of the killers was ‘Red’ Levine who later told him what had happened. The Jews were acting under orders from Meyer Lansky, an ally of Luciano’s in bootlegging and gambling rackets. Senator McClellan asked if Lansky was on the charts displayed at the hearings. No, said Valachi, he was not part of La Cosa Nostra. No senator gave Valachi the chance to talk about Lansky’s organization.

Genovese told Valachi that the killers only ‘made it by minutes’. Maranzano had lined up his own killer, Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll, to slay Luciano and Genovese but they never came. As Maranzano’s murderers left the building they met Coll coming in. As fellow-professionals they told him, ‘Beat it, the cops are on the way.’

In the days that followed Valachi was asked first by his old boss, Tom Gagliano, and then by Vito Genovese to work for them. He chose to go with Genovese and stayed with him for thirty years. Had he chosen Gagliano and Lucchese, he would probably have been happier, risen higher and made more money.

Maranzano founded La Cosa Nostra in his Bronx speech. In six months Lucky Luciano had taken it over. As the apparent mastermind behind the murders of both Masseria and Maranzano, he faced few challengers. At only 33 years of age he had ‘Americanized the mob’. He and his allies had dismissed the old bosses as ‘Moustache Petes’, peasants steeped in the quaint ways of the old country, incapable of seizing the opportunities that America’s wide-open economy presented. One area of disagreement had been over relations with criminals of other races. Luciano did not believe in an exclusively Italian brethren, a view which came in handy when he used Lansky’s hit men to murder Maranzano.

Luciano immediately reformed Maranzano’s new structure for the American Mafia. He abolished the role of ‘boss of bosses’ substituting for it ‘first among equals’. He also removed the power of Mafia capos to execute their soldiers. In future a capo must prove his case to the family’s consigliere before he could order a killing. This greatly improved morale among the troops.

Luciano and Genovese had to go to Chicago to justify Maranzano’s murder at a meeting of the bosses of all America’s crime families. The excuse that he had been hijacking Lucky’s trucks must have gone down well since all the bosses were bootleggers. They promptly sanctioned the killing and acclaimed Luciano as their leader.

Today the structure of the Mafia, or La Cosa Nostra,2 is much as it was when Valachi testified. The FBI now says there are twenty-five families across America but some are really controlled by larger families. Rockford and Springfield, for example, two families in Illinois, come under the huge Chicago ‘Outfit’. Madison, Wisconsin is under Milwaukee. San Francisco and San Jose probably form part of the Los Angeles family. Other cities, like Las Vegas and Miami, have no one family but are hotbeds of organized crime. The Mafia regards them as ‘open cities’. As Americans have moved to the Sunshine Belt, the Mafia has moved too. Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties in Florida now have the greatest concentration of organized-crime residents in America. Texas, Arizona and New Mexico have all reported increased La Cosa Nostra activity. And the Mafia knows no frontiers. There is a powerful family in Canada with large investments in Florida and Atlantic City. The Caribbean is riddled with Mafia-controlled casinos and banks. The families have interests in all the world’s money centres, including London, and wherever heroin is big business.

Today the Mafia is a conglomerate as powerful as any of the world’s major companies. Organized crime acts like a multinational corporation in the way it develops markets, exploits consumer demand, shuts out competition and eliminates opposition. As Herbie Gross, a former front man for the Mafia, puts it, ‘There is the underworld and the overworld, which I call the legal underworld.’ Where the Mafia uses guns, legitimate business uses lawyers. Today the Mafia is even more dangerous because it has gone ‘legitimate’ with huge business investments and smooth-talking, college-educated front men. It now has guns and lawyers.

Valachi died of cancer in jail in 1971. He never gave evidence in any trials but many former gangsters have since followed his example and testified against the Mafia in the courts. Since 1970 they have had a shield of sorts in the Witness Security Program. While they are testifying they have armed protection. They and their families are also given new identities to start life again, thousands of miles from their old haunts. They are meant to get help in finding a straight job. Many witnesses have endless complaints about ‘Witsec’ but their lives are safer now than they would have been not so long ago, when Mafia informers tended to be shot, blown up or thrown off skyscrapers before their fellow-mobsters even went on trial.

In making Crime Inc. we met many federal witnesses. Most refused to be filmed in case they were recognized by neighbours or workmates in the places where they now live. Eight agreed to appear, face-to-camera. Some grew beards or moustaches. One wanted heavy make-up to disguise his appearance. All these witnesses had taken part in organized crime for many years.

Aladena Fratianno, ‘Jimmy the Weasel’, was born near Naples in 1913. When he was four months old the family emigrated to Cleveland, living in Little Italy around Mayfield Road and Murray Hill. His father was an honest citizen but Jimmy became a street criminal. He won his nickname with a fleet-footed escape from a policeman who saw him stealing fruit. At 12 he was working as a waiter in a speakeasy. A few years later he was running crooked dice games and in his early twenties he was robbing customers at other crooks’ gambling houses. At 23, married with a baby daughter, he and some buddies beat up a bookmaker and robbed him of $1600. They were caught and Jimmy was sent to the State Penitentiary. It was nearly eight years before he was released in 1945. By then his wife had been forced by her family to divorce him. Jimmy went straight to Los Angeles and remarried her.

In California Fratianno returned to racketeering: selling black-market goods, hijacking trucks and bookmaking. He made friends with other Italian mobsters from Cleveland and met the leaders of the local Mafia crime family. He became especially friendly with Johnny Roselli, a prominent Chicago mobster who had just served a prison sentence for extorting huge sums from Hollywood movie studios in return for their freedom from industrial disruption.3 With Roselli’s backing Fratianno was initiated into the Los Angeles family. He is the only ‘made’ member of La Cosa Nostra since Valachi to have turned federal witness. Today he is a dapper senior citizen, wisecracking his way through boxes of fat cigars. Despite turning against the Mafia he is probably safer today as a relocated witness than he ever was inside the family.

Fratianno was ‘made’ in a winery in Los Angeles seventeen years after Valachi and 3000 miles from New York, yet their accounts of the ceremony differ only in minor details. Fratianno’s finger was pricked by a sword, not a knife. After he had been initiated, he did not shake hands with the members of the family, he kissed them on the cheek. He was also told not to ‘fool with narcotics’. But whatever the criminal activity the same code of Omerta applied: ‘You can never reveal that you belong to anything or you get killed. They tell you that you come in alive and you go out dead’. Sceptics might say that he must have read Valachi’s Senate testimony and learned it by heart. Defendants have claimed he learned it all from the FBI. But juries all over America have believed him. His evidence has helped convict many top mafiosi including the entire hierarchy of the Los Angeles family, Frank Tieri, the boss of the Genovese family in New York, and Russell Buffalino, the boss of north-east Pennsylvania. Fratianno is the most successful witness the Justice Department has ever had against organized crime.

In 1948 Fratianno soon found out what his main Mafia duty was to be: killing people. In five years he executed five gangsters and took part in the killing of four others. He was always acting on orders and was never paid.

In 1953, for example, Jimmy had orders to kill ‘Russian Louis’ Strauss who was blackmailing a Las Vegas casino owner. The Mafia’s National Commission bans killings in Las Vegas because they scare off gamblers and could upset the cosy relationship which exists between organized crime and the local authorities.

Russian Louis was broke so Jimmy told him he had $12,000 a few hours’ drive away at a house in California. Louis fell for the ploy. When they went in the house, ‘One guy put his arm around Louis and Frank Bompensiero put the rope on him and we killed him. That was it. We choked him. There was about eight or nine people there, all members of our family. They heard I was coming in with Russian Louis so they stayed.’

In our interview I said that most people would prefer not to be around when someone was being strangled. Jimmy replied with a laugh, ‘Oh, not people in the family. They’re killers themselves so it didn’t mean nothing.’

It was like a cabaret?

‘Yeah, just like a little performance. See, like a magician: something disappears, then it comes back.’

But nobody comes back. Russian Louis’ body was never found.

‘No they don’t come back again. They got to wait seven years before they can be pronounced dead.’

How did Jimmy feel about killing people?

‘I didn’t have much feeling because I never killed nobody that was innocent. They were all gangsters, they were killers themselves. It might bother me if I killed an innocent person, somebody that didn’t deserve it. Guys that I fooled with, Mickey Cohen, they were out to kill us. I couldn’t kill a woman, innocent people, kids. I couldn’t do that.’

Even within the family there was work to be done. ‘Frank Borgia was a member of our family. He had an argument with another member and they both went to the boss and the boss decided to kill Borgia.’ Fratianno laughed. ‘Borgia might have been right, I don’t know, but they called me and told me to go to San Diego with Frank Bompensiero to clip Frank Borgia. So we had somebody bring him in the house and we choked him, buried him and that was it. He was a member of our family.’

Did it matter to Jimmy that Borgia was a member of the family?

‘No. The boss said he had to go. I didn’t know the reason. I knew you don’t ask questions. When they tell you to do something you do it. You ain’t gonna ask no questions.’

Killing was how Fratianno ‘made his bones’. A killer is hard to find, even in the Mafia. ‘Some people can kill and some can’t. A lot of people in our family we’d never send to kill anybody because they couldn’t do it. Either you got it or you haven’t got it. Either you’re capable or you’re not. People that weren’t capable, you use them for lookouts. We only had a few in our family that would kill.’

Fratianno was an even rarer creature in organized crime: a killer who could also make money. ‘The purpose of La Cosa Nostra is to make money. Anybody gets in it for one reason, to make money.’ He earned money for himself and his bosses from gambling, loan-sharking and other rackets. He made so much money that in 1952 he was promoted to the rank of caporegime. ‘I was a good hustler, a good leader, I was an all-round man. I could kill, I could draw a man, I could get friendly. I could do things the way they wanted them done.’

Another federal witness was Joseph Cantalupo, arguably the most effective ever to betray the New York and New England families. A husky, well-built, good-looking man, he completed his military service in Germany in 1964 and went to work at his father’s real estate office on 86th Street in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. Soon he realized that his father Anthony was involved with Carlo Gambino, boss of the Gambino family. He also learned that one of Cantalupo Realty’s other salesmen was Joe Colombo, who subsequently became boss of another New York family. Joey became close friends with Colombo and his sons, Anthony and Joe Jun. ‘With the Colombo boys we could go any place in New York, anywhere in the United States and they would have a connection. Everything would be carte blanche, whatever we wanted.’

The Colombo boys were rapidly embraced in the family. In contrast, Joey had to work his way through the ranks of associate criminals before he might be offered membership. He was neither a killer nor a big moneymaker, however, and was never ‘made’. None the less in his fourteen years on the streets of Brooklyn in the businesses and social clubs frequented by ‘made’ men, he became much more than a La Cosa Nostra ‘associate’ – the term used by the FBI to describe anyone working in organized crime who is not ‘made’. He enjoyed friendships with members of four of the five New York families. This enabled him to help convict many Mafiosi, including Frank Tieri, after he voluntarily turned undercover informer and worked for the FBI in 1973, ‘wired up’ with tape-recorders and radio microphones on his body, in his shoes and in his Cadillac. He also won convictions against soldiers in the New England family. Today Cantalupo, like Fratianno, has to live under a new identity far away from his old Mafia haunts.

Joey had been sufficiently trusted by Colombo to be initiated into the Freemasons. The two secret societies had much in common, but Joey saw one difference: ‘The Masons are a fraternal order of brothers. So is the Mafia. But if you disobey the Mafia’s laws the possibilities are that you would wind up in a garbage pail, where in Masonry it does not happen that way.’

Joey recalled the huge power base that the Mafia has established: ‘The organization is in business to make money, firstly from illegal businesses like vice and gambling. All that kind of stuff is essential to the United States because people need to have it. But the ultimate aim of these people is to legitimize as many businesses as they can because then they are bigger than the government. They have all the legitimate businesses but on the side they still have all the illegal businesses. And it’s all making more and more money. It’s just a vast, vast empire.’

Nowadays, according to Joey, the bosses want a different kind of member. ‘“You, my friend, go out and kill Joe Schmoe, and you kill Bobo Bebee – they got all these crazy names – and after you do that we’ll make you a member of our family.” They don’t do that any more. Today it’s more sophisticated: “You go out and show me $1 million profit on a certain business deal and then we’ll make you a “good fellow”. We’ll make you a member of our family.”

‘They’re not interested in murderers any more because they can produce “Greaseballs” from the other side, from Sicily, for £100 and bring them into the USA just to kill somebody. Now they’re interested in legitimate businesses and if you can produce for them – I don’t have to say $1 million, let’s say a $100,000 or $200,000 a year – you can be made a member of an organized-crime family.

‘This makes it a much more dangerous organization today because they got their fingers into everything. There isn’t anything that they do not have a part of in the United States. I don’t care what it is, somebody somewhere has a piece of it.’

Gerry DeNono is another Mafia associate turned informer. Like Fratianno he killed for the mob but he did not make a habit of it. ‘It was strictly business. This kid was on heroin. He went crazy and murdered a client of ours who we did not want anything to happen to. Business is business. He was my responsibility. He was in my crew. He broke our law. He got tried, convicted and executed. It was in a remote area. Nobody else was jeopardized. Very clean, neat. End of story. Goodbye, and that’s it.’

DeNono’s business has landed him in jail where he has to live in a special unit, out of reach of other prisoners who might try to kill him. He has informed on top mobsters in Chicago, Las Vegas, Florida and New Orleans. They would not now appreciate his impish sense of humour.

Gerry finished his military service and fell in with the Mafia on the golf courses of Florida. He was soon introduced to Caesar DiVarco, a caporegime in Chicago, his home town. He ran errands for Caesar in Chicago, like delivering bags of hot money to a crooked bank chairman who ‘washed’ it through the system. He also had to look after a heavy gambler who was an alcoholic and a diabetic. Gerry’s job was to keep him alive to gamble away his fortune to the mob. Gerry then graduated to a crew of Mafia burglars robbing coin and stamp stores across seven states.

‘In Chicago if I want to join a very sophisticated organization called the Mafia, La Cosa Nostra, the Outfit – whatever you want to call it – I must not only pay tribute to the family, I must also buy into it. Let’s say I open up a restaurant, a nightclub, on Rush Street. I put 50 per cent of the business in the family’s name. Now 50 per cent of my receipts go into the family’s bundle. If I open a cigar factory, 50 per cent of those receipts go into the bundle. The money they get from whatever dealings – casinos, cocaine, heroin, prostitution, bookmaking – all goes into a pot.

‘I am not privileged to the money I brought into the organization but this way I become a “made” member. They don’t grab me off the street and say, “Because you shot John Doe in the head twice and did a great job, I now make you a “made” man which entitles you to a piece of all this action.” That’s baloney. The only ones who get “made” are those who have contributed $500,000, $200,000, whatever. Now you get a piece of the Mafia pie. Now you’re “made”.

‘Some guy working with the Outfit, he says, “I had a hell of a good year. Here’s $500,000.1 want to become ‘made’.” Now they go through the ritual and take him into the family because he bought his chair. Just like a stockbroker he bought his chair. Same thing.’