The best thing ever written about crime in America was written not by a criminologist, not by an investigative reporter, not by a novelist, but by a movie critic. The late Robert Warshow, in an essay entitled “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” focused not on crime itself but on the wellsprings of our fascination with it. That Americans are indeed fascinated by crime seems too obvious to be open to serious question. Crime has, as everyone knows, long been a staple of the movies, occasionally inspiring some of the very best films made in this country. In television, crime is perhaps the closest thing to a sure-fire bet there is; the producers, directors, and actors of such long-run television series as The Untouchables, Naked City, The FBI, Mannix, Hawaii Five-O, and God knows how many others, have all lived for many years off crime, or, more precisely, off their countrymen’s apparently unending interest in the subject.
We are all hooked on crime, because, as War-show knew, in our innermost beings most of us partly wish to be gangsters ourselves. By this I do not mean the old banality about everyone having a touch of larceny in his make-up, but rather something closer to what Freud had in mind when he said: “The man who in consequence of his unyielding nature cannot comply with the required suppression of his instincts, becomes a criminal, an outlaw, unless his social position or striking abilities enable him to hold his own as a great man, a ‘hero.’” The gangster, at least as popularly conceived, is a man who need suppress nothing—his whole career, to the extent that it is successful, being a riotous binge of aggression, swinging out freely, grabbing, screwing, killing, taking whom and what he damn-well pleases. As portrayed in the movies, the fundamental attraction of the gangster, in Warshow’s words, is that “he is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become.”
In the movies the gangster is traditionally an overreacher; goaded by his own fierce ambition, invariably he goes too far, and in the end he goes down, shot in the street, or dying in the electric chair or in the gas chamber. Still, before the fall, it is wonderful, possibly even therapeutic, to watch him run rampant, satisfying every one of those instincts the rest of us, consciously or unconsciously, have chosen to suppress. “Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse” was the motto of Nick Romano, the young gangster hero of Willard Motley’s novel Knock on Any Door. There is something winning, if unwise, in that, even though in our own lives most of us choose to live a lot slower and die a lot later (while leaving the problem of the attractiveness of our cadaver to the funeral parlor’s cosmetician).
It is worth dwelling a bit longer on the image of the gangster as he comes down to us through the filter of popular culture because this image has consequences in the real world. While few Americans actually know any gangsters, and probably not many more have ever seen a gangster, the gangster as an experience of art, as Robert War-show again pointed out, is universal to Americans. So pervasive is the figure of the gangster in popular culture that no one in this country can avoid knowledge of him—not least gangsters and law-enforcement officials themselves. No less a moviegoer than Al Capone thought that gangster movies were a bad influence: “They’re doing nothing but harm to the younger element of this country,” he once said. The favorite television show of Meyer Lansky, reputed head of the National Crime Syndicate, turns out to be The FBI. Salvatore “Bill” Bonanno, son of Joseph (Joe Bananas) Bonan-no, don of a New York Mafia “family,” is a constant critic of popular-culture products in his own field, giving high marks to The Godfather and to the movie Bullitt, but coming down hard on The Brotherhood and The Untouchables.
To compound—and confound—matters, it often turns out that real gangsters behave true to type—movie type, that is. In Honor Thy Father,1 Gay Talese’s elaborately detailed study of the Bonanno family, Bonanno fils half the time seems to be acting out the part of some grade-B movie gangster. Thus, in his car, he is forever checking his rearview mirror to see if he is being tailed; in his home, he stashes pistols in bureau drawers, shotguns in the garage, rifles behind cabinets; at one point he searches the hood of his Cadillac for fingerprints left by someone who may have planted a bomb under the hood. Sometimes, though not very often, gangsters will display a rough movie-gangster wit, as in the case of one John “Cockeye” Dunn, a small-time waterfront hood who, upon hearing that he was sentenced to be executed at Sing Sing, declared that at least the electric chair would cure his piles. Perhaps no one relished this sort of thing—what can only be called traditional gangsterly behavior—more than Meyer Lansky, the subject of a recent study by Hank Messick.2 Lansky, a quite untraditional type, is said by Mr. Messick always to have taken an amused view of Mafia shoot-ups and other such outlandish incidents, rather appreciating the way they have tended to take much of the pressure off his own much grander operations. And in fact, Lansky’s view appears to be correct, for when Mr. Messick asked a Justice Department official why Justice under Robert Kennedy emphasized the Mafia, and not Lansky’s National Crime Syndicate, as the main arm of organized crime in America, he was told: “The Mafia was small and handy. The feeling was the American people would buy it with its family relations and blood oaths a lot quicker than they could understand the complex Syndicate. You must remember, we wanted to get public support behind the drive on crime.”
But over the years the official attacks upon organized crime in America have been uneven and the study of organized crime has itself been rather disorganized. As a discipline, it most closely resembles Kremlinology. In both fields, one works with an absolute minimum of factual material, and so extrapolation becomes nearly everything. In Kremlinology one draws certain deductions from, say, the absence of Boris Suslov from a photograph of the Soviet Central Committee; in the study of organized crime one draws similar deductions from, say, the presence of a Lansky lieutenant in Costa Rica. Are such deductions correct? Sometimes they are. Sometimes not. One learns only in retrospect.
One learns only in retrospect, of course, because the very nature of the game involves elaborate secrecy. Only now do we have a fairly firm sense of the history of organized crime in America; only now can events which seemed chaotic and confused when they first occurred be made to yield to a coherent and convincing narrative of who did what to whom, when, why, and with what consequences.
The first point to emerge in the narrative is that there were criminal gangs in America well before the Civil War. In his American Notes, Dickens described the section of Manhattan’s Lower East Side called Five Points as “reeking everywhere with dirt and filth . . . hideous tenements which take their names from robbery and murder.” Gangs with names like the Shirt Tails, the Plug Uglies, and the Dead Rabbits roamed the streets. After the Civil War, a gang calling itself the Whyos came into being and published a price list for potential customers, with services ranging from $2 for a bit of mussing up, to $10 for “nose and jaw broke,” all the way up to $100 for “doing the job.”
Similar gangs evolved in the immigrant neighborhoods of other large American cities. Generally their ethnic make-up could be relied upon to be mainly that of the newest arrivals to America—first the Irish, later the Jews and Italians. There were, to be sure, precedents for crime in the Old World countries from which these immigrants came: we know from Henry Mayhew about gangs in the underworld of Victorian England; from Isaac Babel about the Jewish ghetto gangsters in Odessa, who doubtless existed in the ghettos of other Eastern European cities as well; and in Western Sicily the tradition of the Mafia is said to go back as far as the 13th century. But one did not require much in the way of precedent to enter upon a life of crime in the New World, for crime, as Daniel Bell has pointed out, had long been an American way of life, a fairly well-traveled avenue of upward social mobility, before the parents of the better-known Jewish and Italian gangsters arrived in this country. Nor did crime need to have run in one’s family to have presented itself as a serious career possibility. Al Capone’s father was a barber in Brooklyn, and Meyer Lansky’s father appears to have been a manual laborer.
Considered wholly outside the realm of moral judgment, they were a truly remarkable generation, these gangster sons of Jewish and Italian immigrants born around the turn of the century. Arnold Rothstein, Lucky Luciano, Johnny Torrio, Meyer Lansky—before they were through they would do for crime what the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Carnegies did for capitalism. They would take what had essentially been a cottage industry of independent operators and develop it, expand it, organize it, and make it, in Max Weber’s sense of the term, “rational.” And they would do this at a very early age. Capone was at the height of his power at twenty-nine, Lansky was a power even earlier, and Joseph Bonanno was made head of one of New York’s five large Mafia families at the age of twenty-six. Their achievement required nerve and muscle and, not least, brains.
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The history of organized crime in America in this century can be divided into two main phases: the phase leading up to and including Prohibition and the phase since the repeal of Prohibition up to the present. In an offhand remark, Meyer Lansky, who has lived through both phases, perceived the chief difference between the two when he characterized the earlier period as that in which “balls counted more than brains.”
The dominant figure of the “Era of Balls” was indisputably Al Capone, and the capital city was Chicago. John Kobler, a professional writer of high competence, has recently written a biography of Capone,3 and if Mr. Kobler’s book is somewhat short on brilliance, it is long on documented fact and anecdote. It is quite a story, and not the least interesting thing about it is that where Capone’s life and legend diverge, the life, as resurrected by Mr. Kobler’s diligent research, is generally wilder, more absurd, and madder than the legend itself.
Take, for example, Capone’s nickname, which in the press was always given as Scarface. Capone did have a scar on the left side of his face which ran four inches across the cheek, two inches in front of the left ear, two-and-a-half inches vertically down the jaw, and still another two-and-a-half inches under the ear on the neck. This piece of butchery was the souvenir of an inapposite remark Capone had made to the sister of a petty felon from Brooklyn named Frank Galluccio. Capone was badly scarred, all right, but no one of minimal sanity had enough nerve to call him by his press nickname to his face. Instead he was called “Snorky,” slang of the day for “elegant.” Elegant! Capone stood 5′ 10” and weighed 255 pounds. He had a head with all the subtlety of contour of a cantaloupe; a face nearly obscene in its open and lubricious sensuality. Bedizened in diamonds—rings, stickpins, belt buckle—he would show up at the track in a sunburst yellow suit; in the courtroom he was done up in purple.
Capone’s origins, in life and in crime itself, were humble enough. He was born in Brooklyn in 1899, the son of parents who were Neapolitan. As a boy he ran with the Italian street gangs of his neighborhood (Jewish and Irish gangs had their own respective turfs nearby). He seems to have had an ugly temper from his earliest years. At fourteen, and in the sixth grade at P.S. 113, he slugged a teacher when she reproved him for his truancy; this incident put an end to his formal education. In these years, too, he fell under the influence of John Torrio, a man seventeen years his senior and in the world of organized crime an avant-garde figure. Physically a small man, Torrio had no great taste for violence, but he had no great compunction against using it either. Capone, on the other hand, at least in the years of his adolescence, specialized in violence. A beefy kid who could hit like a truck and who was also good with a pistol, he appears to have been little more than a heavy.
“I looked on Johnny [Torrio] like my adviser and father,” Capone remarked in middle age, “and the party who made it possible for me to get my start.” This is certainly true enough. Capone’s own early efforts to carve out a career for himself were a vast bungle. By the time he was twenty, he was already suspected of two murders and stood to be indicted for a third if a man he had mauled in a barroom brawl died in the hospital. John Torrio, meanwhile, had shifted his headquarters to Chicago, where he worked for an uncle, Big Jim Colisimo, nightclub owner and whoremaster extraordinaire. When Torrio invited Capone to join him in Chicago, Capone didn’t wait for a second invitation; by this time married and the father of a son, he gathered up his family and came running.
Big Jim Colisimo was a vintage character. An opera buff and a man with a fetish for diamonds—he wore several rings, and had precious stones set into his belt, suspenders, garter buckles, tie, watch fob, cufflinks, and vest, and also carried a chamois bag filled with uncut stones—Colisimo had an annual income estimated at roughly $600,000, most of it from gambling, white slaving, and from his own chain of brothels and his nightclub, Colisimo’s Café. The year Torrio brought Capone to Chicago, 1919, business was booming. Big Bill Thompson—one of whose later campaign slogans was “vote early and vote often”—was mayor, the Salvation Army and other independent evangelists made the city’s brothels seem more enticing than they could ever hope to be in reality, and everyone involved in vice of any sort was doing very well indeed.
On January 17, 1920, a year after Capone’s arrival in Chicago, the Volstead Act went into effect and Prohibition became law. This piece of ill-conceived legislated morality provided gangsters with an unprecedented opportunity for a great leap forward, and the more prescient gangsters, John Torrio among them, knew it. But Colisimo, recently remarried, was sluggish about moving into action on the bootleg front. Torrio, who had already worked up agreements with other gangsters to supply bootleg booze all over Chicago, seeing that his uncle had now become eminently dispensable, arranged to have him shot in the vestibule of his own nightclub. At the funeral, a brothel-keeper named Ike Bloom delivered the eulogy. “There wasn’t a piker’s hair on Big Jim’s head,” Bloom said. “He had what a lot of us haven’t got—class.”
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With Colisimo dead, John Torrio’s operation began rolling. Everything was set. The fix was in with the police and the politicians, the problems of distribution and manufacture of bootleg alcohol were solved without great fuss, and the city was divided up among rival gangs, usually organized along ethnic lines. The overriding difficulty, however, was characterological: the number of psychotics, not to speak of simple nuts, among Chicago gangsters ran inordinately high. For example, one Leland Varain, alias Louis Alterie, a member of the Dion O’Banion gang, which controlled the city’s North Side, had so pronounced an obsession with blondes that when he discovered a woman he was traveling with had come by her blondness through peroxide, he threw her off the train. When another member of the O’Banion gang, a Jewish hood named Samuel J. “Nails” Morton, was thrown and kicked to death by a horse in Lincoln Park, the O’Banionites’ reprisal took the form of breaking into the stable, stealing the horse, leading it to the exact spot on the bridal path where it had thrown Morton, and there pumping it full of bullets. Samuzza Amatuna, a member of the Genna gang, which controlled Chicago’s South Side, owned more than two hundred monogrammed shirts, the laundering of which he entrusted to a local Chinese laundry. When the laundry scorched one of the shirts, Amatuna followed the horse-drawn laundry truck and he, too, plugged the horse.
It was in trying to force such men to abide by the intricate jurisdictional lines that Torrio had drawn up in order to take maximum advantage of Prohibition that a determined thug like Capone was useful. Hot, hungry, and physically fearless, Capone complemented the older and cooler Torrio nicely. So nicely, in fact, that Torrio offered to cut him in on 50 per cent of his bootleg business. As soon as he started making serious money, Capone, a good family man, brought his widowed mother and brothers and sister to Chicago, installing them in eight rooms on the second floor of his own home. By 1922, he was still not very well known outside the underworld, and the first time his name was mentioned in the press it was printed as “Alfred Caponi.” In the meantime, a rare fever of reform, short-lived but running high, hit Chicago under the administration of a now-forgotten mayor named William E. Dever, causing Torrio and Capone to move their headquarters to Cicero, a suburban town adjoining Chicago to the west.
The decade that followed provided unprecedented peaks of violence, avarice, and vulgarity. The underworld became a mini-Kremlin—there were power plays everywhere, and the men who had gone to such extraordinary lengths to shoot horses now began shooting one another. Gang wars were only intermittently interrupted by outbreaks of peace. “We’re making a shooting gallery out of a great business,” Capone once complained. Yet he himself was not above the passions of the trigger. When a man in a Cicero bar was stupid enough to call him a “dago pimp,” he squeezed off six rounds in the man’s face. On another occasion, upon learning of a plot to betray him by three of his own entourage, he invited these men to dinner, after which he had them gagged and bound to their chairs with wire, and, baseball bat in hand, personally beat them to death.
In the gangster world, funerals were the chief social occasions of the day. Dion O’Banion, who owned a flower shop, provided Himalayas of flowers, and each gang felt obliged to outdo the next in the ornateness of the caskets it used to bury its deceased members. The great social event of 1925, however, was not a funeral but a wedding at which one of the Genna brothers married the sister of another underworld figure; the wedding cake weighed in at an even ton. But the trophy for the all-time vulgarity sweepstakes has to go to a bootlegger named Terry Druggan, who installed in his Gold Coast duplex a solid silver toilet seat engraved with his name.
After Dion O’Banion was killed in 1924 by two recent Sicilian immigrants hired by Capone and Torrio, things became too hot for Torrio, who soon announced his retirement from the Chicago scene. Capone was on his own. As a leader, he commanded loyalty and respect from underlings. He was a lavish giver of gifts, and paternalistic toward his men in the tradition of the Mafia dons, though, as Mr. Kobler points out, he was never himself a member of the Mafia. Above all, he was always one of the boys; he was a compulsive gambler and, family man though he might be, also a terrific whore-hound. “When a guy don’t fall for a broad,” he once remarked, “he’s through.”
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Despite the murders he was personally responsible for, despite his involvement in vice and in the rackets (the take from his brothels alone was said to be $4 million annually), despite the fact that he could get no life insurance, rode in a $30,000 bulletproof limousine, and employed a food taster, there is reason to believe that Capone continued to think of himself as essentially a businessman. When he bought a mansion in Miami, he offered, in all seriousness, to join the local Rotary. He entertained such show-business figures as George Jessel, Joe E. Lewis, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and Harry Richman. (Richman, who wore flashy jewelry and always carried at least one $1,000 bill on him, was in the habit of getting held up with a fair regularity; to prevent this, Capone wrote a note announcing that Richman was a friend of his. When Richman was next held up he presented the note; his belongings were immediately returned and an apology offered.) At one point, Capone thought to hire Ivy Lee, the public-relations specialist who had done so much for John D. Rockefeller. He was on everyone’s sucker list for charitable contributions, and he gave heavily.
In 1928, Big Bill Thompson decided to go after the Republican nomination for President of the United States. His ambition in this regard required that he solidify his national reputation by routing Capone out of Chicago. This involved extensive harassment of Capone’s men, regular raids on his breweries, brothels, and gambling houses, and extreme pressure on Capone himself, which took the form of an unrelenting surveillance. Toward the end of the year Capone capitulated, announcing at a press conference that he was leaving Chicago for Florida. At this same press conference, he made clear his own view of his career. It turns out that he looked upon himself—and there is no reason to believe that he thought he was conning anyone—as a kind of public servant:
I’ve been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor. I’ve given people the light pleasures, shown them a good time. And all I get is abuse—the existence of a hunted man. I’m called a killer. Ninety per cent of the people of Cook County drink and gamble and my offense has been to furnish them with those amusements. Whatever else they may say, my booze has been good and my games have been on the square. Public service is my motto. I’ve always regarded it as a public service if people were given decent liquor and square games.
He was equally explicit when asked what a gangster thought about when he murdered another gangster in a gang war:
Well, maybe he thinks that the law of self-defense, the way God looks at it, is a little broader than the lawbooks have it. Maybe it means killing a man who’d kill you if he saw you first. Maybe it means killing a man in defense of your business—the way you make the money to take care of your wife and child. I think it does. You can’t blame me for thinking there’s worse fellows in the world than me.
Taken together these two passages remain to this day the definitive gangster self-justification. To the question, Why do you do what you do?, the answer is, I’m only giving people what they want. To the question, Why does it involve killing?, the answer is, I’m only looking after my own.
Capone was eventually brought down—it would be going too far to say he was brought to justice—not because of the crudity of his methods, and not because he was a killer, but because he was what the newspapers call “good copy.” In 1930, for example, the students of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University voted him one of the year’s ten “outstanding personages of the world . . . the characters that actually made history,” along with Gandhi, Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Admiral Byrd, and Henry Ford. When he arrived in his box at Washington Park for the running of the American Derby, the band struck up “This Is a Lonesome Town When You’re Not Around.” Capone picks cubs to win 1930 flag. . . . Capone doesn’t go to church on Sundays. . . . this was the stuff of headlines. He had become synonymous with crime itself, and although the press tended to treat crime as a national sport of sorts, Capone was, in the dimension of his reputation, a living insult to legally constituted authority. He once told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune: “Nobody’s really on the legit, when it comes down to cases, you know that.” It is one thing to believe this, another to say it, and still a third to have it credited to you in print. Candor so raw eventually set no less a figure than the President of the United States on his neck. Herbert Hoover loosed a special Prohibition detail to wreck Capone financially, while agents of the Internal Revenue Service—Capone had never filed a tax return—would move in to finish the job by sending him to jail for tax evasion.
In 1931, Capone was sentenced to eleven years imprisonment, fined $50,000, and made to pay court costs of another $30,000. He was supposed to serve his time at Leavenworth, but a few years later he was shifted to the maximum security prison of Alcatraz. Capone had long before contracted syphilis, and in prison it worsened. (Capone, the fearless killer, was himself deathly afraid of hypodermic needles, and so all along had refused treatment for his venereal infection.) In 1939, partially paralyzed, he was transferred to the newly opened Federal Correction Institution at Terminal Island near Los Angeles. After the last of his fines had been paid, he was transferred again, this time to the U.S. Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and it was there, on November 16, 1939, that his wife and brother came to pick him up—to scrape him up, really, for he was by then, at forty, a totally shattered man. He lived eight more years, eventually dying in bed of the effects of a brain hemorrhage brought on by his irreversible case of neurosyphilitis. His last years were lived in a dark fog of incomprehension, with only occasional lapses into the false bright clarity of paranoia.
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Although Al Capone was easily the best-known gangster of his own or any other time, he was in point of fact rather a parochial figure. While he made millions working the rich vein of Chicago, he never thought to expand his operations outside the fringes of that city, and even at the height of his power he never controlled more than a third of it. Capone was held in considerable respect by other gangsters around the nation, but he was not invited to attend what is now thought to have been the first meeting of organized crime on a national scale which took place in Cleveland in December 1928. The meeting was exclusively a Sicilian affair, and Capone, though he did not attend personally, was represented by Chicago mafiosi. Along with John Torrio, he did attend another such meeting, this one cutting across ethnic lines, held in Atlantic City in the spring of 1929. And during the Castellammarese War among rival factions of the New York Mafia families, Capone is said to have sent a lieutenant, one Paul Ricca, to inform the New Yorkers to settle their differences quickly or the boys from Chicago would enter the war and, Ricca is supposed to have said, “if it is necessary we will even employ airplanes, because those means are ready and concentrated in a specified place.” Yet in the main Capone’s interests were local—that is, Chicago-wide—in scope.
Nor was Capone much for modern financial maneuvers. In fact, according to Mr. Kobler, he never kept a bank account. Having an Old World distrust of banks, he paid cash for everything, from huge political payoffs to household items, which made it all the more difficult for the Internal Revenue agents to work up their case against him. What money Capone had that didn’t go out for fixes, gifts, charity, and general high living, he kept in a trunk at the foot of his bed. In this and in his readiness for violence and his lack of scrupulousness about details (big ones, like never filing a tax return), Capone was almost quaintly antique. Indeed, during the time he was making his biggest splash, and right through the period of his crash, subtler criminal minds were at work, thinking larger thoughts and harboring grander ambitions.
Such a man was Meyer Lansky. Lansky was born in Grodno, Russia in 1902, three years after Al Capone, whom he has thus far survived for nearly a quarter of a century. He was brought to the United States, along with a brother and sister, in 1911. In America he went to the New York public schools through the eighth grade. Today he is fighting deportation proceedings in Israel, and has recently been indicted in the United States, along with three other men, for skimming $36 million off the top of profits from the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas.
Soon to be seventy, Lansky lived through the Capone “Era of Balls” and is usually conceded to be the major architect of the subsequent “Era of Brains.” A small man (5′ 4½” and under 140 pounds), Lansky bears more than a physical resemblance to John Torrio: neither man ever had any emotional need for violence, though neither had any moral squeamishness about calling it into play where he deemed it necessary; and each man was a poor customer for those services—whoring, gambling, drinking—upon which they both made their fortunes. Highly self-controlled, seemingly dispassionate yet burning with ambition, as personalities they were two cubes of very dry ice. What Torrio attempted, unsuccessfully, to achieve in Chicago—an organization of gangsters along jurisdictional lines as well as cutting across ethnic ties—Lansky would achieve nationally and, in part, internationally.
Lansky’s first job out of school was working for a tool and die maker. He then went on to service stolen cars: removing the serial numbers, disguising their original appearance, souping up the motors, building in extra storage space for bootlegging. From here he went into the business of renting stolen cars to gangsters. With Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, a friend acquired in adolescence, he next, according to Mr. Messick, went into contract killing; in this his operation was a forerunner of Murder, Inc., which was to become an internal policing force for those gangsters who stepped out of line. In all these youthful activities, Lansky was punctual, reliable, and altogether a man who could be depended upon to deliver the goods.
As a bootlegger, Lansky was not only a superior businessman but a consummate diplomat. In order to convoy contraband liquor out of Canada and the Bahamas, he forged alliances with gangsters in Boston, Cleveland, and other cities around the country. In this as in other matters Lansky showed himself to be wholly untainted by New York provincialism. Mr. Messick quotes him as telling Lucky Luciano in the 1920’s: “We get the idea that New York is the world. It ain’t. There’s plenty of money and muscle out there in the sticks.”
Lansky’s true triumph as an organizer has been precisely a triumph over this sort of provincialism and over parochialism of any sort in the criminal world. Throughout his career he has been single-minded in the pursuit of material profit, which is perhaps the chief reason behind his contempt for the Mafia, with its strange notions of offended dignity, its self-defeating heroics, its penchant for vengeance at any cost, and its overall narrow view of the world. In the 1950’s, many years after Lansky had successfully put together the National Crime Syndicate, the Mafia spirit continued to rear its parochial head. At one point, when the late Albert Anastasia attempted to move in on Lansky’s gambling empire in Cuba, a meeting of Syndicate representatives ordered him out. Anastasia took it badly, threatening to remove the Mafia from the Syndicate. Other prominent Mafia dons, Vito Genovese and Gerardo Catena among them, pleased with the prosperity Lansky had brought, laughed at the prospect. According to Mr. Messick, in his rage Anastasia screamed out: “You bastards have sold yourselves to the Jews. The traditions of the Honored Society have been forgotten. The old days were bad, maybe, but at least we could hold up our heads in pride. We had respect then; now we’re a bunch of fucking businessmen.”
Lansky was able to convert such men into businessmen only by dint of patience, discipline, and the most extraordinary cunning. He was greatly aided in this endeavor by his relationship with Lucky Luciano. A Sicilian by birth, Luciano was a mafioso, but one who had passed well beyond the relatively primitive Mafia psychology and the code of behavior that went with it. Lansky and Luciano worked well together in their respective bootlegging ventures, and Lansky also had once rescued Luciano from death in a Mafia factional escapade. As Lansky hoped to streamline organized crime generally, Luciano hoped to do the same for the Mafia. The Castellammarese War of 1930-31 presented both men with an excellent opportunity to achieve their respective ends.
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The Castellammarese War was to the world of American gangsters what the Civil War was to the United States—its last great internal convulsion. Before this war, the American Mafia was comprised of Old World Sicilian Mafia dons, sometimes called Mustache Petes, whose various families were ranked hierarchically, with the head of the most powerful family being considered the “Boss of Bosses.” Given the Mafia mentality, with its inflated concern for personal dignity, a concern which amounted to a form of cultural paranoia that saw affronts to that dignity everywhere, the position of Boss of Bosses was not one that held much hope of longevity. Moreover, during times of factional strife, mafiosi would drop everything else and give themselves over wholly to vendetta. This was not only costly but, as Luciano discovered, damned dangerous. Luciano and other younger men in the Mafia grew tired of the rigidity of the older Mafia dons and their xenophobia, they had had enough of senseless intramural warfare entered into for reasons of pride, and wanted to see the Mafia reformed along cooperative and more modern lines.
In 1930, much of this discontent came to a head when Joseph Masseria, a powerful New York Mafia don, attempted to take over the New York Mafia family headed by Salvatore Maranzano, who came from the region on the northwest coast of Sicily bordering the Gulf of Castellammare. Reprisal predictably followed reprisal, the entire Mafia world divided itself into one of the two rival camps, and over the course of the next year the casualties totalled about sixty. Luciano, Vito Genovese, and Frank Costello were members of the Masseria family. In the hope of doing away with the old-line Mafia system, Luciano made a deal with the Maranzano family to betray Masseria. This he did, leading the aging don into an ambush at a Coney Island restaurant, where, after Luciano had excused himself to go to the washroom, “persons unknown” entered the restaurant and shot Masseria six times in the head and back.
But all, as it must at first have seemed to Luciano, for nought; for once he became dominant, Salvatore Maranzano acted no differently from any of the previous Mafia Bosses of Bosses. So it next became necessary to liquidate Maranzano. On the afternoon of September 11, 1931, four men entered Maranzano’s office in the Grand Central Building in Manhattan, flashed police badges, and asked to see Maranzano. When they left, Maranzano had four bullet-holes in him, six knife wounds, and a slashed throat. One Nicola “Culicchia” Gentile, a Mafia troubleshooter during these years, in recounting the murder put the number of assassins at six; he described them as “Jewish youths.” All Mafiologists seem agreed that it was Meyer Lansky who had contracted with the men to do the job on Luciano’s behalf.
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The Mafia was not the whole of organized crime in America, but it has in this century always been a significant element in organized crime. By nature exclusionary, it required one to be a Sicilian to belong—with very few exceptions; as noted earlier, Capone, whose parents were Neapolitan, was not in the Mafia yet Vito Genovese, who was also Neapolitan, and Frank Costello, a Calabrian, were both allowed to breach the ban against non-Sicilians. After the Castellammarese War, under Luciano’s guidance, the Mafia underwent certain internal reforms—the institution of the Boss of Bosses was replaced by a national commission to settle internal arguments and make overall policy—and an opening was made to the outside world. Though residues of it would remain, the old Sicilian clannishness was largely done for, and a new spirit of cooperation with other gangster factions, chiefly Jews and Italians, set in. While there was no longer any Boss of Bosses, Luciano was obviously the number one man on the Mafia national commission. And Meyer Lansky, for obvious reasons, was very tight with Luciano.
The Castellammarese War took place during the worst years of the Depression, though on the whole organized crime throughout this period suffered very little. In fact, the Depression offered gangsters some rather special opportunities; they, after all, were among the handful of people who had a ready supply of cash on hand. Strangely enough, the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the Presidency in 1932 provided another opportunity. Not long after his election, Roosevelt, wishing to undercut charges that he was elected as a machine candidate, took steps to break up some of the larger city machines. Whereas before gangsters had to pay politicians heavily for small favors, now the politicians, in need of campaign funds and votes, were more likely to come to them, with the result that in many cities organized crime was in the buyer’s seat.
Meanwhile, the National Crime Syndicate, as the various elements of organized crime could now be called, underwent a certain amount of internal reform of its own. At a 1934 meeting at the Waldorf in New York, Mr. Messick (like others before him) tells us, the Syndicate began to talk about expansion and diversification in a serious way. In part, the new organization would be reshaped along the lines of the New Deal’s National Recovery Act. Regional boards were set up to control criminal activity within specified geographical boundaries, with only a national board above them to hear appeals and set overall policy. In the larger cities crime was to be divided along industrial lines, with different men put in charge of various criminal industries: gambling, prostitution, labor racketeering, etc. Certain broad policy decisions were made—killing, for example, would be more tactfully handled, and both newspapermen and police officials, no matter what their nuisance value, were put strictly off limits. On October 25, 1935, Dutch Schultz, the only major crime figure who had not gone along with the ideas and mandates of the National Crime Syndicate, was gunned down at the Palace Chophouse in Newark. Schultz’s death eliminated the last of the important schismatics.
The year that followed marked a period of great expansion. Plush gambling casinos, called “rug joints” in the trade, were opened in New Orleans and Hot Springs; Bugsy Siegel pioneered Las Vegas by building the Flamingo Hotel; Lansky developed Broward County in Florida. Other territories were also scouted: Lansky, again, established relations with the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, which were later to prove useful in establishing the great Syndicate-run casino-hotels in Havana; the Bahamas were checked out for future possibilities. Infiltrations were made into legitimate businesses. Under Lansky’s guidance, modern accounting procedures were instituted, with special care given to methods of eluding tax indictments while still allowing ample room for skimming millions off the top of profits from such legal ventures as gambling in Nevada. Organized crime became big and smooth and corporatized, and the shaping hand in its metamorphosis was Lansky’s—he sat in effect, in Mr. Messick’s phrase, as “Chairman of the Board.”
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With its new bigness, organized crime also took on a grey and shadowy quality. The Syndicate, the Organization, the Mob, whatever one chooses to call it, began to seem simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. For people with a penchant for conspiracy theories, the hand of organized crime, as once upon a time for others the hand of the Communists, seems to explain everything. In a crime-minded city like Chicago, for example, the most mundane events are often what might be called Syndicate-explainable. A suburban bar is dimly lit and has a Cadillac and Lincoln parked out front—must be a Syndicate joint. A young man of Italian surname in a low-paying job buys a new Thunderbird convertible—must be running errands for the Mob. A businessman goes bankrupt, then two years later opens a business twice the size of his original one—must be Organization money behind him. And so it goes. In the end nobody knows for sure.
To complicate matters further, the most extravagant stories about the Syndicate do indeed sometimes turn out to be true. There is ample evidence, for example, that during World War II U.S. Naval Intelligence called in Syndicate help to root out espionage and potential sabotage on the New York docks, and that the Syndicate, which had well-entrenched operations there, cooperated. Later in the war the United States government, acting through American Syndicate figures, and the Sicilian Mafia, which had for long years been suppressed by Mussolini, apparently made an arrangement to facilitate the Allied invasion of Sicily. What was in it for the Syndicate was a promised parole for Lucky Luciano—and, lo, at the war’s end Luciano was indeed paroled and subsequently deported.
The truth of such ostensibly incredible stories makes it nearly impossible altogether to disbelieve anything about the Syndicate—a fact movie and television scriptwriters have used to advantage. So, alas, at times does Mr. Messick, which is rather a shame, since he really is extraordinarily knowledgeable about his subject. The problem is, in Lansky, Mr. Messick is a man with a mission. He would like to see Lansky locked away, and his passion sometimes gets the better of his prose and his judgment. By contrast, Gay Talese’s book on the Mafia family headed by Joseph Bonanno, Honor Thy Father, suffers from the opposite fault: a total identification with the subject. So thoroughly indeed does Mr. Talese identify with the Bonannos that no critical distance ever develops, all issues get blurred, and the entire picture finally slips from focus.
One day in the corridor of the federal court building in Manhattan, Talese, then a reporter on the New York Times, approached Bill Bonanno, son of the Mafia don Joseph Bonanno and his family’s number-three man, with the idea of writing a book about his, Bill Bonanno’s, boyhood. Bill Bonanno was then busy with larger things, chief among them his father’s alleged kidnapping by underworld figures a few months before, but he was, Talese sensed, not altogether cool to the idea. Talese eventually established a relationship with the younger Bonanno—“a friendship,” he calls it—and before long Bill Bonanno spilled the beans about his private life to an extent that must have surpassed Mr. Talese’s wildest expectations. And yet, when one has gotten through the more than five-hundred thickly detailed and fluently written pages of Honor Thy Father, one comes up with just that—beans. In considering gangster movies, Robert Warshow wrote: “Since we do not see the rational and routine aspects of the gangster’s behavior, the practice of brutality—the quality of unmixed criminality—becomes the totality of his career.” In Honor Thy Father just the reverse occurs: we get none of the brutality of the Bonannos’ criminal life but only its domesticity—Sicilian Mamas preparing large meals of snails and pasta, men sitting around watching television and playing with their grandchildren, family weddings, and so on. We do not ever see any member of the Bonannos’ Mafia family at work. From 1966 through 1969 this family was involved in a Mafia factional struggle popularly known as the Banana War in which nine were killed. Yet never in Mr. Talese’s book do Bill Bonanno and his father ever kill anyone, or superintend any criminal operations, or take any illegal money, or indeed commit any serious crime of any kind (although at one point in the narrative Bill is ambushed and shot at). The reasons that specific criminal acts on the part of the Bonannos do not show up in Mr. Talese’s book are obvious enough. Still, the overall effect of avoiding their criminal, and concentrating instead on their domestic, lives is to turn the Bonannos into just plain folks, a kind of Italo-American Swiss Family Robinson.
But the Bonannos are not just plain folks. Joseph Bonanno, a man of the older generation of gangsters, was originally a member of the Maranzano Mafia family. He was given command of his own family in the reorganization which took place at the conclusion of the Castellammarese War. At that time he was the youngest of all the Mafia dons. In the early 60’s he achieved some national notoriety when it was discovered that he was the Mafia sponsor of Joe Valachi. Apparently in Mafia circles Joseph Bonanno was always considered something of an overreacher. Vito Genovese, according to Hank Messick, continually suspected him of trying to move in on his, Genovese’s, territory. Darkly handsome, a careful dresser, something of a sport with money—Mr. Talese tells a story about how when a friend picked up a check on him at a restaurant, Bonanno père tore up the hundred dollar bill with which he himself had intended to pay the check and left it in little pieces in the ashtray—Joseph Bonanno is above all a taciturn man. Taciturnity, however, is not a quality that could be attributed to his son, Bill. Surely the Mafia imperative of omerta, the vow of silence, has never been more thoroughly outraged than it was in Bill Bonanno’s collaboration with Mr. Talese on this book. Now that the book is out, Bill Bonanno must certainly be unfit any longer for a life of crime. But perhaps it is just as well; perhaps he was never cut out for it in the first place. As a gangster, he seems bush-league and rather inept. He already had an ulcer in his adolescence.
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In truth, the once simple game of cops and robbers has become appallingly intricate, and, though this may offend one’s sporting sense, it is now clearly weighted on the side of the cops. Wiretapping and bugging devices have reached a high and subtle stage of development. Mr. Talese reports that the FBI once installed bugs into the foundation and the very framework of one hood’s new home before the carpenters had finished working on it. Early in Honor Thy Father Bill Bonanno is concerned that FBI agents might break into his home posing as burglars to install bugs, and he kept an electronic debugging device in his Long Island home.
Life in the courtroom has also become more arduous. Because of a new federal law, a suspected criminal subpoenaed for questioning must either testify or be prepared to be cited for contempt. If he testifies, and if he is in fact a criminal, he is faced with one of three possibilities: incriminating himself, committing (and later being tried for) perjury, or betraying his associates. One other alternative is to go into long boring months of hiding to avoid being subpoenaed. For not testifying before a grand jury in connection with his father’s disappearance, Bill. Bonanno was cited for contempt and made to serve a brief stretch in jail.
Then there is the Internal Revenue to worry about. If one has any kind of reputation as a gangster, the IRS monitors everything. In 1968 Bill Bonanno lost a tax case in Arizona and owed the government roughly $60,000; his property, home, and business holdings were tied up; and the interest on his various debts was something on the order of $160 a day. It was in part because of this that he used a borrowed credit card, which ended in a four-year jail sentence and a $10,000 fine. What happened to him, one might well think, shouldn’t happen to a businessman.
Bill Bonanno would say that it wouldn’t happen to a businessman. Throughout Honor Thy Father there is a kind of chorus, sometimes sung by Bill Bonanno, sometimes by Mr. Talese, to the effect that the Mafia and other gangsters are really only servants to a hypocritical society, providing the illegal commodities of gambling, prostitution, and so on that the public demands and the law forbids. Bill Bonanno reflects on the atrocities committed by the Green Berets in Vietnam, and how next to these the total of nine murders in the Banana War seems small change, and that in any event nine murders is “probably less than the number of murders each month among married American couples.” And in case any of us happened to have missed the point, Mr. Talese underlines it by noting that on the same day and in the same building in which Bill Bonanno was being tried on his credit-card case, the bribery case of James Marcus, a case involving the theft of millions in a white-collar crime, was also being tried.
But then we have heard all this before. It is the argument, updated four decades, of Capone: “Nobody’s really on the legit, when it comes down to cases.” Perhaps not. But there are cases and there are cases. True enough, nobody uses the services of organized crime unwittingly, no one is enticed into the vices it purveys. A bookie doesn’t look for a gambler, a gambler looks for a bookie. Or consider the people who use the services of Syndicate loan sharks, or “juice men” as they are called. They are usually people, as Bill Bonanno points out, who cannot get a loan from a bank or a loan agency or any other reliable source because they have already been branded unreliable. Juice men do not look for such people, such people look for juice men. It is all very neat, except for one point Bonanno doesn’t mention—the man in debt to the Syndicate who doesn’t repay his loan, along with its staggering interest, gets killed. Maybe “nobody’s really on the legit,” but some are ready to go further than others.
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The men who have controlled organized crime in this country have by and large been willing to go all the way. As such, they pose a profound problem. Mr. Talese compares the government’s anti-crime crusade—actually the last three governments’: Kennedy’s, Johnson’s, and Nixon’s—with Mussolini’s successful anti-Mafia campaign in Sicily, “disregarding civil rights as it invaded privacy and [relying] on shady informers, [recording] a series of highly publicized arrests of mafiosi and reputed mafiosi, incarcerating many men who seemed ready for the old-age home.” The comparison with Mussolini is a heavy-handed touch, for the Mafia in Sicily, after all, has another enemy named Danilo Dolci. Dolci fights the Mafia because he believes—and there is a considerable amount of evidence on his side—that, more than any single element, the Mafia has bled Sicily white and kept it poor and backward all these years.
It does not seem bizarre to suggest that if allowed to do so, gangsters would do the same here or in any other country. And so it has seemed necessary to abrogate some of the values of our society in order to contain them. Their phones are tapped, their homes and offices bugged, the back of justice is nearly wrenched in the effort to imprison them for crimes—tax evasion, mail fraud, carrying non-prescription drugs—largely irrelevant to their real deeds. The alternative would seem to be to allow them to flourish. Nevertheless, when civil liberties are set aside, even in the name of a very rough, and no matter how well-deserved, justice, everyone is in danger of paying the price. In the final analysis, this may be the most significant inroad that organized crime has made on American life.
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1 World, 526 pp., $10.00.
2 Lansky, Putnam, 286 pp., $6.95.
3 Capone, Putnam, 409 pp., $8.95.
