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CHAPTER 9

Frank “The Bomp” Bompensiero

Frank Bompensiero and Jimmy Fratianno both started out as hit men for the mob. They became known for their infamous “Italian rope trick,” where a noose is thrown over the neck of the victim and each man pulls until the individual chokes to death, leaving a surprised look on the victim’s face.

Fratianno admitted murdering five men and being present at killings of an additional six, but that’s just what he confessed. Agents who knew him and tailed him believe he murdered as many as thirty men. His most famous quote was, “I never killed anyone who didn’t deserve to die.” But it was Frank Bompensiero’s ruthlessness that was legendary among law enforcement officials in California. Even Fratianno once stated that Bompensiero “had buried more bones than could be found in the Brontosaurus room of the Museum of Natural History.”¹ Bompensiero could not act on his resentment of Ettleman by knocking him off, but there was another way he could do great harm to him. Unknown to everyone in the underworld, Frank Bompensiero had become an FBI snitch.

The CI&I reports that young detective Bill Palmini read in his investigation of the Trident’s safe burglary were based on leaks stemming from Frank Bompensiero. Had Palmini known this, he no doubt would have asked “why?” Why would a fearsome, old-time Mafia tough guy like Frank Bompensiero turn and place his life on the line?

Few infamous men have the cunning or toughness from which legends are born. Frank Bompensiero—or “The Bomp,” as some in the media liked to refer to him—may have come close to having it. It is not surprising that his persona was included in the hit television series, The Sopranos. The character Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero, played by actor Vincent Pastore, was said to be based largely on Frank Bompensiero.

The stepping stones that led Bompensiero to turn and become an FBI informant started forming in the mid-1950s, initiated by his own sloppiness in connection to the surreptitious issuing of liquor licenses developed by State Board Equalization member Bill Bonelli. Bonelli’s so-called Saloon Empire, where bribes flowed like whiskey on a Friday night, contained a roster of Mafia figures, whom Bompensiero endangered of being dragged down with him when he was indicted by a grand jury and ordered to stand trial for receiving a five-thousand-dollar bribe from Jacumba Café owner Ernest Gillenberg Jacumba.²

Bompensiero was unlucky when he got John Hewicker as the presiding judge for his trial. Hewicker had just finished reading Ed Reid’s 1954 book, Mafia, in which Bompensiero was listed as number twenty-six among eighty-three Mafia members. The book also addressed Bompensiero’s close friend and associate, Momo Adamo, along with Jack Dragna. They were all linked to the American Mafia, which Reid described in the chapter, “Phi Beta Mafia,” as being more dangerous than communism.³

This was a strong statement to make in an era of lingering McCarthyism. Crime damages the economy and creates astronomical costs for taxpayers. It also creates personal and public turmoil. But now, according to Reid, it was politically dangerous to the safety of the nation. Reid’s reasoning was that the Mafia had cooperated with Mussolini during World War II as well as Joseph Stalin, who was out to destroy the United States. Stalin was in a position to hire Mafia members to work internally to bring down the country.⁴

Hewicker could not wait for the day he had Bompensiero in his court. And as Judith Moore wrote in The San Diego Reader, Hewicker “was smacking his lips at the thought of getting himself the real McCoy. He finally had himself a big criminal, and he was ready to lower the boom on him.”⁵

Frank DeSimone was Bompensiero’s lead lawyer. He was the same DeSimone who was involved in the botched-up murder attempt on Mickey Cohen with Bompensiero and other Italian mobsters in Jack Dragna’s war on the Jewish gangsters in California. DeSimone tried to have Hewicker disqualified because he was prejudiced. He tried every trick he knew in the law books, but in the end he failed. Bompensiero was found guilty of the bribery charge and the conspiracy to bribe in the Bonelli liquor license scandal. Hewicker ended up sentencing Bompensiero to three to forty-two years in prison and ordered him to pay a five-thousand-dollar fine on each of the three counts for which he was found guilty.⁶

Bart Sheela, the prosecutor in the case, recalled that on Friday, April 29, 1955, when he and others from the prosecution team were sitting in a bar at a San Diego hotel waiting for the verdict to come out on Bompensiero, the defendant was seated at a nearby table having drinks with his lawyers, including DeSimone. As Sheela recalls, “Frank comes over to me and he says, ‘Sheela, what they pay you in the district attorney’s office?’ I said, ‘Six hundred sixteen dollars a month.’ Frank says, ‘I paid those assholes seventy thousand dollars and I think you got the best side of it. Wise up.’”⁷

Sheela thought Bompensiero’s lawyers were well qualified. One of them even served in the DA’s office shortly before Sheela joined the agency. Sheela added:

“Bompensiero really was on the fringes of this liquor license business. The San Diego prosecution was after Charles E. Berry, a district liquor control administrator and a middleman in the clandestine system organized by State Board Equalization member William “Big Bill” Bonelli,” Sheela claimed. “Had [Bompensiero] been willing to talk to us and said to us, ‘I passed this money on to Berry,’ he would have gotten a free ride. But he didn’t. He hung tough.”⁸

Bompensiero had no choice but to hang tough and take his medicine. It would have cost him his life if he did not, because of the other mafia figures who could have been dragged into the case. And the organization was not thrilled that Bompensiero put Mafia members in this predicament. Three months after Bompensiero’s trial, a Mafia elder, Anthony Pinelli, called Bompensiero a “dumb hoodlum.” It was a careless slip Bompensiero had committed. Who takes and then cashes a five-thousand-dollar bribe in the form of a check? It appears that the system was so blatant, Bompensiero got too comfortable with it. But it cost him dearly.

Shortly after he was sentenced to prison, Bompensiero’s first wife died. He was allowed to attend her funeral handcuffed, with a police escort. When he got out of prison, he married the widow of his former close friend Girolamo “Momo” Adamo, a long time underboss to Jack Dragna. Adamo might have been boss of Los Angeles had Frank DeSimone not usurped the number one spot when he took over Southern California after Jack Dragna’s death.

It has been insinuated that the vote giving DeSimone the leadership was rigged. For one, DeSimone visited Bompensiero in prison to get his vote. He left claiming Bompensiero gave it to him. This wasn’t true but Bompensiero did not challenge it. He was in no position to do so. In Bompensiero’s view, Adamo possessed far more experience within the organization than DeSimone did. No doubt he would have preferred that Adamo had lived and ruled in place of DeSimone.

It is not surprising that DeSimone took over the reins of the Los Angeles crime family. He was of a different pedigree from Adamo or for that matter Frank Bompensiero, who dropped out of Andrew Jackson Elementary School in Milwaukee in the third grade. Frank DeSimone’s father was a don, heading an Italian crime family in 1922, which formed the seedling of the future Los Angeles crime families to come. DeSimone, referred to as “One Eyed,” because one of his eyes drooped, was himself a graduate of the University of Southern California Law School. A practicing criminal lawyer, his mobster clients included Jack Dragna, “Momo” Adamo, Jimmy Fratianno and Bompensiero.

John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli was another DeSimone client. Mafia buffs know Roselli as the man hired by the CIA in the 1960s to kill Fidel Castro. Roselli took the CIA’s money, but considered it too dangerous to go to Cuba. He is also alleged to have been the actual gunman who shot and killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. His main role during the prime of his career was to control Hollywood and Las Vegas for the Chicago outfit. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin sponsored Roselli for membership in the Beverly Hills Friar’s Club, where he became involved in a card cheating ring. This led to a court case and threatened deportation, causing his shining star to plummet rapidly.⁹

When DeSimone came to power, he demoted Bompensiero to the rank of soldier. He also demoted Adamo to that rank. And if one is to believe a police informant, DeSimone forced Adamo to watch while he raped Adamo’s wife, Marie. Traumatized and humiliated, months later Adamo shot Marie in the head during a heated argument and then fatally shot himself. Marie survived, but lost one eye. Rumors spread that Marie was having an affair during their marriage, and that it was this that most likely led to Adamo’s humiliation and eventually caused him to shoot his wife and then himself.¹⁰

Bompensiero was locked down in San Quentin when this happened. But one must wonder what he thought when he got the news, since many abusive husbands were found beaten to death in Sicilian neighborhoods of San Diego. Bompensiero was suspected by some locals to have played the role of that avenger, leaving a trail of widows behind. He had no tolerance for men who abused women. There are those who believe it was Bompensiero who had the affair with Marie Adamo. Judith Moore, in her series on Frank Bompensiero, wrote about this: Bompensiero’s daughter and only child recalled that her mother had predicted that if something ever happened to her, she could envision Marie Adamo going after Bompensiero. Marie was a pretty and flirtatious woman in her younger days and that was not lost on those around her. But after “Momo” Adamo’s suicide, she married a Navy officer.

Because of his demotion to soldier by DeSimone, Bompensiero kept his distance from the Los Angeles family. But he was not silent about his feelings toward DeSimone and his group, which included Underboss Nick Licata and Jack Dragna’s nephew, Louis Tom Dragna: he referred to them as “pezzi de merde” or “pieces of shit.” His disillusionment with the Mafia organization, at least in Los Angeles, appeared to be complete by then.

In The San Diego Reader, Judith Moore wrote:

After Frank DeSimone’s takeover of the Los Angeles family, this army to which Bompensiero had allied himself for almost four decades was no longer noble. It had outlived its reason for being. It had become something that was not in favor of justice. What remained must have seemed to Bompensiero not an army of Sicilian men of honor, but a backbiting crew of coarse American thugs and goons. ¹¹

Bompensiero’s daughter told Moore, “I used to ask my father, ‘Daddy, what is the Mafia?’ And he’d say, ‘Honey, what are you talking about? That’s the olden days; no such thing anymore as the Mafia. No such thing. All a bunch of bullshit.’”¹²

Upon Bompensiero’s release from San Quentin in May 1960, his brother drove up to Marin County to pick him up and drive him back to San Diego. Bompensiero’s release was followed by a five-year probation. Part of his parole regimen was that he had to keep away from bars and restaurants where liquor was served. Not only was he no longer allowed to work in a bar, but he was not allowed to own one. Bompensiero floated around trying out different gigs to give him the appearance of working, for he had to show he was making an honest living and not supporting himself through illegal activity. He got a part-time job at famous radio and TV personality Art Linkletter’s son’s fruit company, but this did not last long once the younger Linkletter, Jack, learned who Bompensiero was. Jack Linkletter told Bompensiero that he could not work there, because Jack could not be tainted by Bompensiero’s reputation. Bompensiero, Jack Linkletter recalls, was polite and told him he understood and left. But privately he was cursing.¹³

Then, Jimmy Fratianno came up with a scheme involving a project in the Central Valley of California. It offered Bompensiero an opportunity to cover his parole board requirements, even though it constituted long daily travel during the week from San Diego to El Centro. But now he had a legal job: he was a representative of the Fratianno Trucking Company that entered into subcontracts to haul dirt on an hourly basis for Central Valley highway construction.

To cut back on the long commute, at times Bompensiero stayed with Fratianno in a two-bedroom motel suite where, unbeknownst to the two men, the FBI set up listening devices.¹⁴