Читать книгу A Rookie Cop vs. The West Coast Mafia - Tanya Chalupa - Страница 16

CHAPTER 8

The Best in the West

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Ettleman had a smooth operation going. It is a puzzle why, with the large sums of money he was collecting from safe burglaries, he singled out a couple of well-to-do gamblers in Las Vegas to rob, but he did. One explanation is that he was bored and he was a thief. It must be hard for a thief not to steal at every given opportunity. Whatever the reason, Ettleman was arrested at Caesar’s Palace for burglarizing a wealthy gambler’s suite in the Dunes Hotel. Arresting officers found on him an Atlantic Richfield credit card under another name. They also discovered a fake driver’s license and social security card bearing the same name as on the credit card. Ettleman, who gave his occupation as “drapery hanger,” could not and would not explain the objects found on him.¹

Thanks to his brilliant if expensive lawyers, Ettleman managed to steer clear of long prison sentences, in spite of law enforcement efforts to hold a tight grip on him and limit his activities. A little more than two weeks after his arrest at Caesar’s Palace, he was spotted at the Landmark Hotel eyeing another rich gambler. He was recognized as having been recently arrested by the CCS Burglary Unit for possession of stolen credit cards and someone recalled him being listed in the 1967 Western States Crime Conference Manual as an accomplished torch man. As a result, Ettleman was booked and jailed again. This time it was for vagrancy loitering, even though he was registered as a guest at the hotel. The explanation in the report was that he had “no legitimate business within the hotel and appeared to be casing the various players at the game tables, possibly in connection with a burglary of the victims’ rooms.”²

William Ettleman’s steady source of income remained safecracking and his burglary ring continued to flourish. The steady members of his crew of master safecrackers continued to be Eddie “Italian” DeVaney, Jackson “Nevada” Dillon and Ralph “Indian” Morris.

Born in San Francisco in 1937, Edward DeVaney was the oldest of four children in a conservative Catholic family. His father ran a welding business and, at fourteen years of age, DeVaney dropped out of ninth grade to work full time in his father’s shop, where he learned the art of handling an acetylene torch.

Ralph Morris was half Irish and half Paiute. The Paiutes, before their encounter with Europeans in the early nineteenth century, inhabited the area of Pyramid Lake near Reno and the Moapa Valley, a small Southern segment of Nevada. With his dark good looks and bravado, he easily attracted women. Because of his Native American background, Morris was typically referred to in mob circles as “The Indian.” He was considered one of the best in the West among safecrackers.

Morris learned his “trade” from another super burglar, Sam Bailey, who was once associated with the gang of an all-time infamous burglar, Jimmy Ing. There was a vast difference between Ettleman’s and Ing’s style. As Jackson Dillon describes it, “Ing was an animal and Ettleman was a professional.”

Dillon worked with Jimmy Ing, too. He recalls Ing always carrying a double holster. One time Ing was driving and Dillon was with him, seated in the front passenger seat, when a Nevada motorcycle cop pulled them over for speeding. When the officer walked up to Ing, Ing rolled down his window and asked the policeman, “Do you think your family wants to live?”

“What?” The motorcycle cop looked puzzled.

“I’m Jimmy Ing and I just asked you if your family wants to live.” Ing pushed back his jacket to reveal a holster. Dillon recalls the cop looked suddenly nervous. “All he could say was, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Ing. My mistake. I didn’t realize it was you,’ and he walked away without giving us a ticket.”

Ing was killed in a shootout in 1967 when local law enforcement learned from an inside snitch that Ing was planning to steal valuable artwork from the home of a very wealthy Reno physician. The snitch is said to have been Joe Conforte, owner of the infamous Mustang Ranch, a brothel outside of Reno. Reno police came well prepared, even bringing a coroner with them to the stakeout. When Ing stepped out and appeared to reach for his gun, he was bombarded with bullets. And the coroner was there to pronounce him dead on the spot.

After Ing’s death, Bailey assumed leadership and recruited some of the Ing gang members. Bailey also recruited his wife’s brother who became known as an expert core driller and torch man among his criminal peers. Other members of Ing’s gang formed their own splinter groups. Two of those best known to law enforcement agencies were the Herd Family Gang and the Geary Street Gang.

Sam Bailey was born in Texas in 1934. His first conviction for attempted burglary was at age twenty-four. Over the next fifteen years, this was followed by a series of arrests for burglary, robbery and receipt and transportation of stolen property. In 1972, he received a sentence of three years for a California post office burglary. While Bailey and his men were involved in a variety of criminal activities, which included forgery, arson and even murder, they were best known for their post office burglaries. The Inspection Service’s data of criminal investigations show that in just the year 1978, as much as $663,000 was lost in 1,063 postal burglaries. But as an Inspection Service Bulletin article points out, $407,000 of that sum—almost two-thirds—was stolen by Sam Bailey and his group in just three burglaries.³

While there are no exact figures of the profits organized crime made each year in California, the estimates by the government are mindboggling. It is believed that around $4.8 billion was gained each year from crime-related gambling activities alone. Loan sharking, which is closely linked to gambling operations, brought in $1.3 billion per year. Finally, another five hundred million was lost per year through organized crime-related securities thefts and investment frauds.⁴

Just as Ettleman used the carpet and decorating business as his “legitimate front,” Bailey ran a roofing company in Idaho. In his early adult years he worked as a sheriff’s deputy and even had the impudence to advertise his roofing company in a law enforcement brochure with the caption under his company’s name, “Let Sam Bailey’s Gang Do The Job.”

Ettleman was far more generous in the shares he allowed his men to keep, unlike Bailey, who took 80 percent of the cut for himself. Bailey lost some of his better safecrackers like Morris and Dillon to Ettleman. But Ettleman and Bailey worked well together and frequently teamed up. They were professionals and there were enough businesses to burglarize for both men.⁵

But it was not all smooth sailing in Ettleman’s relationship with Bailey’s former protégé, Ralph “Indian” Morris, even though both men liked each other. Ettleman objected at first when Morris, who was twice divorced, became romantically involved with Ettleman’s beautiful seventeen-year-old niece, Luette. On top of that, Morris was seventeen years her senior.

Ettleman was fond of his niece and she of him. Luette’s most vivid recollection of Ettleman is riding in his convertible, the top of which was not properly closed, so that rain was seeping in. But he could not care less, as he sang along loudly with a Lobo hit, Me and You and a Dog Named Boo.

Once Luette and Ralph got married, Ettleman appeared to quickly come to peace with the idea of Ralph Morris being in the family. Even when things got rough later on, he was fine with Morris. And after Morris and Luette got married, Ettleman began hanging out with the newlyweds, taking Luette and Morris to check out future scores. He even involved Luette in some of the jobs they pulled. Luette remembers drying paper money in hotel rooms, laying out the wet bills on a bed and the floor. Sometimes she used a hair dryer to speed up the process. It dumbfounds her today how accepting her attitude was toward her uncle’s and her husband’s livelihood.

Morris and Luette married in Carson City. Luette does not remember much about the day she and Morris wed, except that it was around eighteen months before the birth of their daughter, who inherited the best physical characteristics of both of her good-looking parents. If so, it places Luette’s and Ralph Morris’s marriage as taking place one month before Dodge Ridge. What Luette recalls about the wedding day itself is that she was very young and very drunk and that she wore a sleeveless, blue chiffon dress. She also had on the three-carat diamond ring Morris had given her.

“I was uncomfortable,” Luette stated in describing how she felt on her wedding day. “I knew he was only marrying me because he thought he was going to prison.” There was someone else Luette was interested in, but she pushed him aside because she was marrying Morris. Luette believes the wedding date was selected because Ettleman was away at the time on a trip and that it was all part of her mother’s orchestration.

Dillon, by then a Vietnam vet, served as best man. He wore his typical attire: a cowboy hat over shoulder length hair, a Wyatt Earp coat down to below his calves and, like his former mentor, Jimmy Ing, he wore two shoulder holsters hidden underneath the coat.

Dillon’s own career in crime began when he was a youngster. His father, an electrical engineer, turned to burglary during the Great Depression. When Dillon was still in grade school, his father and his uncle took him on jobs because he could crawl through spaces they could not. Soon Dillon got to be so good at what he did that his father and uncle sent him to break into stores and houses on his own while they waited for him in a nearby tavern. Eventually, the family moved to Colorado, where an uncle had close ties to Scotty Spinuzzi—the very same Colorado boss with whom Ettleman came to have a close relationship, both personally and professionally.

Born March 26, 1910, in Pueblo, Colorado, Joseph “Scotty” Spinuzzi was approximately thirteen years older than Ettleman. Like many twentieth century mobsters, his criminal activities also grew out of the Prohibition Era. By the time he was in his early forties, the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce highlighted him as a link between Al Capone’s and Frank Costello’s criminal empires in Chicago and New York. In his late forties, Scotty Spinuzzi accompanied the then Pueblo boss, James “Black Jim” Coletti, to the Appalachian meeting in upstate New York, now known as a summit of one hundred top Mafiosi from the United States, Canada and Italy.⁶

The Appalachian meeting was to be held on the property of Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara. It was intended to be a “good ole boys” barbeque party, where participants had a chance to establish or re-establish relationships. But it became a fiasco after local law enforcement grew suspicious when they noticed the arrival of very expensive cars with out-of-state plates in their tiny jurisdiction. A raid ensued which resulted in the arrest of sixty underworld bosses, causing embarrassment for the Sicilian organization.⁷

The police raid exposed the Mafia or “La Cosa Nostra” (LCN), another name for the Sicilian-run mob which translates to “Our Thing” in English, as it is sometimes called in the United States. In the process it embarrassed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who claimed there was no such thing as the Mafia.

When he was young, Scotty Spinuzzi was known for his dark good looks. He also had a reputation for being vicious in a fight. A former Pueblo cop, John J. Knocilja, Jr., who arrested Spinuzzi several times, said this about him: “Scotty was a mean devil. He was mean. [He] was a good sized man. He’d Sunday punch you, but he could stand up and fist fight with you too. He got to be low key [later in life], but this guy used to get in fights, he’d pistol-whip people.” But the most astonishing account surrounding Spinuzzi’s life is how he literally got away with murder, for it reflects both his power and his madness.⁸

On September 15, 1960, Spinuzzi was hanging out at Pueblo’s Five Queens Club with a friend, Harry Ricci, and Joseph Parloato, the club’s manager. On that day, the club’s twenty-nine-year-old African-American pianist, James D. Scott, had two of his buddies, who were Air Force servicemen, visiting him from Colorado Springs. There was also a white woman in their company.

The story gets hazy here, for some reports allege the problem arose when Scott danced with the woman and others claim the argument started when the two servicemen and their female companion got into an argument with the bartender over twenty-five cents they dropped into an unplugged jukebox. Scott joined the argument. Parloato and Ricci then forcibly removed the four men from the club’s premises. Outside the door, the verbal confrontation continued. Spinuzzi followed the group outside, threatening to “blow their brains out” if they did not leave the grounds completely. As Scott’s pals started to take off in their vehicle, Spinuzzi turned ferocious. Holding a pistol to the young pianist’s head, he kicked and hit him. Scott tried to wrestle away, but fell backward and Spinuzzi fell on top of him. Then a shot was heard. Still holding the gun, Spinuzzi pushed himself up off Scott and fled the scene.

The crime might have gone totally unnoticed had police officers who were conducting routine patrol work not turned the corner in their patrol car and spotted the two servicemen from Colorado Springs putting Scott’s body in the trunk of their car. The officers stopped Scott’s friends and soon saw the man in the trunk was dead. They immediately put the “freeze” on everything.

In Spinuzzi’s trial for the murder of James D. Scott, Judge George Blickhahn ruled that there was insufficient evidence to try Spinuzzi and issued a directed verdict of not guilty. Blickhahn was quoted as instructing the jury, “Nothing can be left to conjecture” and no one saw who fired the shot that killed Scott. No witness came forward to state otherwise.

The joke around town started that Spinuzzi got off because “no one saw the bullet leave the gun.” The FBI also believed that Spinuzzi received sanction and protection from local law enforcement authorities, because the Mafia net was cast widely in Colorado. Eventually, the Colorado Supreme Court chastised Blickhahn for his verdict, but it ruled that a retrial would constitute double jeopardy (a procedural clause in the Fifth Amendment forbidding a defendant from being tried again on the same or similar charges following a legitimate acquittal or conviction).

Mafia criminal activities during Scotty Spinuzzi’s rise to power were divided into two ruling factions in Colorado: Denver and Pueblo. Dick Kreck, author of Smaldone: The Untold Story of An American Crime Family, confirms that the “real” Mafia was in Pueblo. Denver came to be ruled by two brothers: Clyde Smaldone, who was the head of the crime family from the thirties until his retirement in the sixties, and Eugene “Checkers” Smaldone. The latter was said to be the tougher of the Smaldone brothers. The relationship between the crime families in Pueblo and Denver was friendly and cooperative. The Smaldone family was also closely aligned with the Kansas City mob, as was the Pueblo crime family.⁹

Until 1969, Pueblo was ruled by James “Black Jim” Coletti, who was a part-time owner with New York City Mafia boss Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno of the Colorado Cheese Company in Pueblo and Trinidad. When Coletti retired, Scotty Spinuzzi took over the reins. And with Spinuzzi’s meteoric rise, Ettleman’s clout also skyrocketed among the top leadership in the Mafia. Ettleman knew which shooting star to latch onto.

Etttleman found newlyweds Ralph and Luette Morris an apartment in Stockton, where he frequently stayed with them when conducting criminial activities in the region. During this period, he was active in running stolen credit card rings.¹⁰

A couple of post offices were hit by Ettleman’s crew in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was not only the cash and stamps that were taken, but also a series of credit cards. Fenced stamps brought in 80 percent of their value. But the credit cards that were stolen in the post office heists circulated as far south as Texas and Oklahoma.

The Texas-California connection and the movement of Ettleman’s stolen credit cards may be explained by Ed Reid, who in his book, The Grim Reapers, states that Los Angeles boss Nick Licata’s dominion stretched from Los Angeles to San Diego and into Texas, where in Dallas, Licata shared the rule with Joe Civello, an importer of food and liquor and the head of a Dallas crime family. He was the same Joe Civello whose personal acquaintance, Jack Ruby, murdered presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in front of law enforcement and a swarm of media cameras. Civello is said to have been related to former Los Angeles boss Frank DeSimone, whom Licata replaced and to the very same James “Black Jim” Coletti who was replaced by Scotty Spinuzzi as boss of Pueblo, Colorado.¹¹

This is just a small sample of how intricately linked the relationships between Mafia bosses was and how closely Ettleman was aligned with its top echelon through Spinuzzi. Although Ettleman was an outsider in the Sicilian organization, he moved in its elite circles. And the men just discussed hung on a higher rung in the Mafia organization than the feared San Diego boss Frank Bompensiero. Because of this, Bompensiero secretly resented Ettleman. And so did his close buddy, Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno.¹²