Читать книгу A Rookie Cop vs. The West Coast Mafia - Tanya Chalupa - Страница 15
ОглавлениеA unique aspect of Ettleman, in addition to the complexities of a criminal mind, is the degree to which he hid his Jewish heritage. His family hid it from the younger generations, as well as from those outside the family.
James Ettleman, Ettleman’s younger brother, when asked about what the family’s religion was, seemed reluctant to discuss the subject. He was awkwardly silent. Then he smacked his fist against the palm of his hand and said, “By golly, I’m sorry we hid the fact we’re Jewish. We should have been proud of it. Our name was originally Edelman and our family came from Germany. They anglicized the name to Ettleman.”
James Ettleman claimed not to have known why they kept their background secret, other than perhaps it had something to do with “the Italians.” Ettleman’s niece, Luette, confirmed the family’s Jewish roots. She learned of this very late in life and only after an older family member, an aunt, told her it was true. It was quite a shock to her.
While the family’s distancing from their heritage may well have started in earlier generations, Ettleman had very good reasons not to expose his background. The best explanation for Ettleman’s reluctance to share his Jewish heritage can be found in Judith Moore’s book about San Diego boss Frank Bompensiero, A Bad, Bad Boy, in the chapter titled “Jews take on Dragna.”1
Jack Dragna was the kingpin of the California mob for twenty-five years. There were then three main Mafia Charters in California: Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego. Of the three, Los Angeles was the powerhouse. San Diego was basically an appendage of Los Angeles. At one time, Jack Dragna ruled both.
Like many in the mob, Jack Dragna got his start bootlegging during Prohibition. Born in 1898 in Corleone, Sicily, Dragna was allegedly involved with the Black Hand, an extortion racket consisting of Sicilian Mafia members in Italy and the United States. He took over the Los Angeles crime family in 1931.
The pinnacle of Mafia family power consisted of a ruling triad: a boss, his underboss and his consigliere—the counselor. After Jack Dragna took over the Los Angeles crime family, he made his brother his consigliere. He also had several other relatives working in the crime family. Decades later, his nephew Louis Tom Dragna, Jack’s brother Tom’s son, came to be co-boss of Los Angeles with Jimmy Fratianno when then boss Dominic Brooklier was sent to prison with his underboss on racketeering charges under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
Two major players in the California Mafia owed their life to Dragna: Nick Licata and Frank Bompensiero. Nick Licata, who was Los Angeles’s boss from 1962 to 1974, was Sicilian by birth like most of the early American Mafia. As a teenager, he settled in Detroit and, shortly after, joined the Detroit Mafia family of Joe Zerilli. Somehow Licata offended Zerilli and fled to California. Zerilli put a hit on Licata with Jack Dragna. But instead of murdering Licata, Dragna convinced Zerilli to cancel the contract and took Licata into his own organization, thereby earning great devotion from Licata.2
San Diego boss Frank Bompensiero, on the other hand, was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1905. His parents, Giuseppe and Anna Maria, had arrived in the city about a year earlier from Porticello, a fishing village outside Palermo, Sicily. Bompensiero’s parents became American citizens, but Frank’s father’s health did not take well to the cold Wisconsin winters. In 1915, Giuseppe took his wife, Frank, Frank’s brother and Frank’s two sisters and sailed back with them to Porticello. There were rumors floating around that the elder Bompensiero, a laborer, was connected to the mob and might have gotten into some hot water with the ruling families.3
Frank Bompensiero had an uncle on his father’s side, Salvatore, who remained in Milwaukee. And when Bompensiero returned to the United States several years later, it is believed he stayed with his uncle. It was the Prohibition era and young Frank became involved with bootlegging. He got into trouble with the ruling families when he fatally shot another smuggler. No one knows why he shot the man. Perhaps it was because he was young, nervous, it was dark and he did not recognize him. To escape the consequences, Bompensiero jumped a freight train and made his way to San Diego around the early 1920s. By then, San Diego had a robust, tightly knit Sicilian population, many of whom had emigrated from San Francisco after the city’s 1905 earthquake.
While Bompensiero blended in and took up fishing as a livelihood, he could not hide forever. It was his future mother-in-law, a remarkably resourceful individual, who pleaded with LA crime boss Jack Dragna on his behalf and may have even paid Dragna a large sum of money to get Frank Bompensiero off the hook. Jack Dragna negotiated with the Milwaukee families and Bompensiero was spared. After that, Frank Bompensiero left fishing to work for Dragna. He was deeply in debt to his new boss.4
Throughout the years, Frank Bompensiero had only praise for Jack Dragna, even though it took him around twenty years before he saw any pay-off for all the work he did for Dragna. And while one may say he was indentured to Dragna, Bompensiero truly believed in Dragna’s style and version of the Mafia, which contained echoes of Don Corleone in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. He was an old school don, frequently referred to as “the mustache don.”
Jack Dragna’s problem with Jewish gangsters started with Meyer Lansky. After Prohibition began, many mobsters turned to gambling and bookmaking as the new source of illegal revenue. Jack Dragna led a takeover for a piece of the action in the Los Angeles area. Meyer Lansky got the idea to send his longtime friend, Bugsy Siegel, to establish gambling throughout the West. He convinced Lucky Luciano, with whom he had a lasting partnership, to go along with the idea. Lansky, after all, was the one who was instrumental in Luciano’s rise to power, when he organized the 1931 murder of the powerful Salvatore Maranzano so that Luciano could take over. Luciano phoned Jack Dragna and the latter reluctantly agreed to work with Siegel.5 As another infamous legendary mobster, Mickey Cohen, explains it in Mickey Cohen: In My Own Words (As told to John Peer Nugent):
Benny (Siegel) was part and parcel of New York. He was all-powerful and connected with the main organization back East, on a par with anybody you could mention—Joe Adonis, Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello. In Los Angeles there was this Italian man by the name of Jack Dragna. Jack was very powerful and very well respected, but he got kind of lackadaisical. He wasn’t able to put a lot of things together to the satisfaction of the eastern people, or even keep things together for himself to their satisfaction…So Benny came out here to get things moving good. Although Benny had great respect for the Italians, he was always considered like a boss on his own. See, outside the East, like in New Jersey, the Jews and the Italians had a strong combine together, or as close as any Italian could be with any non-Italian. But Dragna was of the old school where only Italians ran things and certainly not Jews like Benny with his Eastern ways. But that didn’t bother Benny none. ‘Fuck Dragna’ was his attitude…
Dragna was really from the old mustache days. The worst thing you can do to an old-time Italian mahoff [big shot] is to harm his prestige in any way, and that’s what took place when Benny came out here.
Jack Dragna did not like to be connected with Siegel…Thomas Lucchese in New York was Jack Dragna’s goombah and a real nice guy. Benny’s was Meyer Lansky. Jack Dragna was actually the complete boss out here before Siegel and I come out here. Now when Benny and I come out here, two Jews, then Meyer made trips out here. So it was really an encroachment on Dragna’s Italian territory. He (Benny) didn’t realize it at first, but I started to get wind of it when I had more meetings with Jack Dragna. He would get in a little zing all the time to Benny and the Jews. You gotta remember the old-time Italian outlook on things. Pride is a tremendous thing with them.6
Jack Dragna got his chance at revenge. In June 1947, with Lansky’s reluctant approval, the East Coast crime families murdered Siegel in the Beverly Hills home of his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, for failure to manage the new Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas properly. Mickey Cohen, who worked with Siegel, immediately took over Siegel’s rackets and refused to accept Dragna’s authority. Dragna ordered several murder attempts on Cohen, but each time luck was on Cohen’s side. He miraculously survived all the clumsy attempts on his life that Dragna ordered. The men Dragna sent to kill Cohen included Frank DeSimone (who later became a Los Angeles crime family boss), Frank Bompensiero, Nick Licata and Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno.7
Dominic Brooklier, who succeeded Licata as boss in 1974, at one time had been a strong-arm man for Mickey Cohen, but he wisely switched over to Jack Dragna in the Cohen-Dragna war over control of LA’s gambling outlets. Had he not done so, Dragna would have had him executed.
Mickey Cohen eventually made peace with the Italians and everything was forgiven, including the sloppy attempts on his life. But by that time Cohen was an old man. At that point Jack Dragna was gone too. He died in Los Angeles in 1956 at the age of sixty-four, when Ettleman was running the so-called Station Wagon Gang. Ettleman knew the history and the gossip of his criminal predecessors. He also knew of Jack Dragna’s legacy. His power within the Mafia came largely from Scotty Spinuzzi, but in California where he lived and did much of his “work,” he dealt with the very bosses who were involved in the Jewish-Italian war for control of Los Angeles.
In the circles in which he was running, it could have been politically suicidal for him to admit he was Jewish. Instead, he made up an elaborate pedigree claiming roots in France and Scotland. It was not in his own interest to remind the California Mafia bosses, with whom he had a symbiotic relationship, of Jack Dragna’s war against the Jews.
