Mafia secrets, p.5
Mafia Secrets, page 5
The street where the fight was to be had apartment buildings on it, with easy access to the roof. I took my milk bottles up there, so I was looking down at the gang that had picked on me at the dance.
I set the bottles on their sides for a moment so that the kerosene soaked the rag, and then I lit the rags and threw the bottles off the roof to the street below. They scattered. Next time I saw them I said, “Sorry I couldn’t make the fight. I heard you guys had a fire.”
I thought that would be the end of it, but these guys didn’t want to give up. They’d been scared by the very kid they were trying to bully. Their only thought was to how could they up the ante. The next time I was at a dance with those guys, they all carried zip guns. (I never carried a gun as a kid. Guns meant nothing but trouble.)
One night I’m at a dance, again in Corona, Queens. I was dressed in a nice suit. Mr. Costello gave me a wardrobe budget and I always looked sharp. I showed up wearing a suit that the bullies couldn’t afford.
At the end of the night, as I left the dance, a group of thugs got in my way, pulled zips, and, when I turned to flee, shot me twice: in the upper thigh and my ass. I don’t know who they were. I figured Gotti put them up to it.
I managed to duck down into a storm sewer and hung on the ladder by my good arm. I was dripping blood, and hungry rats were collecting at the base of the ladder. First, I hid from the guys who shot me, then I hid from the cops who came after reports of gunshots.
I knew better than to let a cop see me with a bullet hole in me. Frank Costello told me rule number one was don’t bring any trouble. I hung there feeding the rats with my blood until I was sure everyone had gone and climbed back up. I knew a “pharmacist” who took the bullets out.
After that, Mr. Costello decided to send me out of town. I would continue doing what I was doing, although sometimes I’d pick up packages in Las Vegas and deliver them to Chicago. Sometimes I’d go to New Orleans and pick up something that I was to immediately deliver to him. I was under strict orders not to deal with any street-level guys. Underbosses and bosses only.
Along with making sure no one knew my name, Mr. Costello also said that I should not be photographed: “If you see a photographer, turn your head away. I don’t want anyone to know what you look like. Anyone asks you your name, what do you say?”
“I’m the Kid.”
“No, really, what’s your name? What do you say then?”
“I’m Frank Costello’s boy.”
“That’s good. Yes.”
I figured he was worried about kidnapping or something. I now know that the idea was to use me and, when necessary, hide me, lay low till the heat was off, so that my part in a complicated scenario could never be proved. In case his plan didn’t work, I had prearranged legal help as well. (Of course, when Mr. Costello hid me, he hid me in complete luxury. I did not complain.)
And so, I went on a tour of America—and Cuba. One at a time I met every Mob boss.
CHAPTER 3
Tour of Bosses
In Las Vegas, I met a colorful character nicknamed “Mr. Entertainment,” Jack Entratter. He ran the Sands Hotel and was responsible for booking the Rat Pack in that casino’s Big Room. He was about forty years old when I met him and had been in the casino entertainment biz since he was very young.
Entratter started in casinos as a teenager, working as a reservation clerk for the French Casino in Miami. In 1940, when he was twenty-six, he came north and worked as a bouncer at New York’s Stork Club, where he stayed and accrued power for twelve years until he had a controlling interest in the joint.
He booked the talent at the Copacabana, met the top showbiz names, and became a close friend of Frank Sinatra and his pals. At thirty-six, Entratter went to Vegas and became the general manager of the Sands, which at that time was considered not just one of the best hotels in Vegas, but in the world.
For Frank and the Rat Pack, Entratter built a nightclub into the Sands called the Copa Room. It was a classic Vegas room: late-night shows, top-name singers and dancers, comics working blue.
Gamblers were frequently bought drinks gratis. The food in the restaurants was top notch. And Entratter inspected it all to make sure it was up to snuff. He, himself, didn’t drink or smoke—or sleep, it sometimes seemed.
Though he was active in Jewish causes—being one of the founders of the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas and president of Temple Beth Sholom from 1959 to 1963—Entratter had several associates who were suspected of gangland activity. Construction of the Sands, for example, had been financed with the help of the great Meyer Lansky and another Jewish gangster named Hyman Abrams.
The Sands was the first of the modern hotel/casino complexes to be built on what would become the Vegas Strip. The hotel was known for its sign out front, fifty-six feet high and asymmetrically cantilevered. The sign said Sands in an upward-slanting script, huge S in front, and in smaller letters below, “A PLACE IN THE SUN.”
The sign was already well known when it became iconic in 1960 during filming of the freewheeling heist picture Ocean’s 11. The stars of that picture—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop, that is, the Rat Pack—posed in front of the sign. The image became the most famous photo of the Sands, the most famous photo of the Rat Pack, and the most famous photo of Las Vegas.
At the Sands’ 1952 opening, twelve thousand people showed up and each was given a Chamois bag with silver dollars in it. The opening day promotion cost the Sands $200,000, but it was well worth it, as the vig made up the difference in a matter of hours. In those days, silver dollars were used in the slot machines, then known as one-armed bandits.
At first, the hotel part of the complex was relatively small—but it grew.
My first out-of-town job for Mr. Costello was flying to Las Vegas to pick up a bag at the Sands Hotel. Mr. Costello told me, while I was there, I should keep my eyes and ears open for “loose talk.”
“You always pick up on a Monday,” Mr. Costello explained. “That’s because you’re picking up the skim. You take the package to Chicago, see a guy, they take some, give you back the rest, and you bring that here to New York and give it to Blackie.”
I was old enough that Mr. Costello told me what was going to be in the package.
“It could be as much as a million dollars,” he said. “If someone tries to rob you, give them the money—it’s only money, there’s more where that came from—but try to get the motherfucker’s name.”
And so, I bought a plane ticket to Vegas. Zero airport security back then. If somebody asked me my name, I said, “John Smith.”
At the Sands, I was told to report to pit boss Milton Frank. You’ve seen the Scorsese picture Casino. Frank was played by Don Rickles. I was walking into the real-life version, completely dazzled by the bells and whistles. The rooms at the Sands Hotel were named after thoroughbred racetracks. The Outfit guys stayed in the rooms named after Illinois tracks.
Jack Entratter spent six million dollars of the Sands’s budget on a private house on the property for high rollers to use as a party house. And that was what it became. The house had a pool that was surrounded by an eight-foot fence. With that privacy, the pool became the orgy site for the stars.
That pool was a happening place where hoods, stars, and showgirls mingled. The Rat Pack hung out. I saw some fantastic things. That was where I saw U.S. senator and future presidential candidate Jack Kennedy snorting cocaine off actress Juliet Prowse’s stomach. She had fantastic legs.
Kennedy said Prowse was the first woman he’d ever seen with a shaved pussy. She said she shaved her pubes because she was a dancer.
After snorting the line, Jack looked up at Dean Martin and said, “Dean, this is better than that Percodan you gave me.”
Percodan was an opiated aspirin.
Jack was feeling no pain.
There was already talk that he was going to be president, which made me wonder what the world was going to be like with a drug-sniffing pussy hound in the White House. Well, we all found out.
Nobody paid any attention to me. I was well dressed, and too young to be threatening. They must’ve thought I worked there, and they made no effort to hide things from me. I saw famous actresses, award-winning actresses, having lesbian sex at poolside without a care in the world.
I picked up the package, following Mr. Costello’s instructions to the letter, and flew it to Chicago. There I met boss Tony Accardo.
Accardo was American-born but clung to the ways of the Old World. He was the son of a Sicilian cobbler and his wife. Tony started out in the rackets as Al Capone’s bodyguard. Tony got to quit school at fourteen rather than the legal sixteen. His dad needed him to get a job and help around the house. Dad forged a fake birth certificate.
Once on the streets, teenaged Accardo joined a ragged bunch of juvenile delinquents named the Circus Café Gang. His first chores as a gangmember were as lookout, mugger, and armed robber. But, as this was Prohibition, he soon evolved into a bootlegger.
Accardo was so good at tough-guy tasks that he attracted the attention of “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, who recruited him into Al Capone’s gang. Accardo earned major points with his boss in 1926 during a shoot-out when he took a bullet that was intended for Capone.
His first known kill was that of Hymie Weiss, leader of Chicago’s North Side Gang, near the Holy Name Cathedral, in October 1926. About two and a half years later, Accardo was one of four Capone men who rubbed out seven members of the North Side Gang in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Accardo’s nickname was “Joe Batters” because he used a baseball bat for stuff other than hitting a baseball. He was big and would come at guys with one bat in each hand. Boom, boom, you had two broken arms. Destroying men with a bat became Accardo’s signature.
Later on, when he grew old and big, he was known as “Big Tuna,” after a photo was published showing him with a giant tuna fish he’d caught on a deep-sea expedition.
Accardo became known as a quiet and effective leader who usually did the thing that was best for business, and that was usually a nonviolent solution to beefs.
(“It’s always better not to shoot,” Meyer Lansky once said—but not everyone agreed with him.)
Because Accardo was the way he was—keeping a low profile, tugging the brim of his hat over his eyes when a photographer was near, and never having to do jail time—it was relatively easy for him to move in on legitimate businesses, worm his way in through intimidation, and his empire diversified to include real estate (commercial buildings and shopping malls), truck and car dealerships, newspapers, hotels, paper and lumber factories, and travel agencies.
Accardo became underboss of the Outfit in 1943 when Frank Nitti shot himself. Soon thereafter, when boss Paul “The Waiter” Ricca was arrested and charged with extortion, Accardo became the Outfit’s top cat.
As boss, he introduced innovations, some new rackets, and some updated old ones. He sold counterfeit cigarettes, no sales tax, replaced many of the city’s ancient brothels with call girl services. Now the girls came to the customer, very convenient for the busy businessman.
In 1957, Accardo mostly stayed in his River Forest, Illinois, mansion (which had its own bowling alley). That was where I met him.
Not long after our meeting, a massive tax probe called Accardo to testify, and he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights 172 times—which might be the record.
In Chicago, I was introduced to the Outfit bigwigs as Frank Costello’s Boy, then dealt with Nick Nitti (Frank’s son), and sometimes Milwaukee boss Frank Balistrieri. Nitti and I, as you’ll read, had all kinds of adventures together.
I also met the nightclub owners, the Fischetti brothers. They were originally from New York but moved to Chicago to be closer to their first cousin, Al Capone. The oldest Fischetti brother was Rocco, aka Rocky, aka Ralph Fisher. The others were Charles and Joseph. They made their first million as bootleggers, and after Prohibition ran a gambling joint called the Rock Garden Club.
Sometime around the end of World War II, Frank Sinatra befriended the brothers, and it was through the Fischettis that Sinatra originally was mobbed up in Chicago. Frank accompanied the Fischettis to the so-called Havana Conference, during which they delivered a suitcase holding two million dollars to the exiled Boss of Bosses, Lucky Luciano. Later, Frank went to Chicago boss Tony Accardo and said he wanted to be with him.
Accardo called the Fischettis: “Your Italian songbird is here and says he wants to be with me and not you.”
The Fischettis laughed.
Frank Costello heard about this and told Accardo, “Now we both got him. You take eight weeks and I’ll take eight weeks.” That was sixteen weeks that Sinatra had to work and got paid nothing. This was a pattern that followed Sinatra for his entire life. Near the end, he was still up there performing, with monitors all over the stage to help him remember the lyrics he’d been singing for fifty years. And he was doing it not because he wanted to, but because he had to. People wondered why he was doing this to himself. He wasn’t. The Mob was making him do it, because the high rollers would come out to see him even if he was just humming while hanging upside down.
When I next saw Mr. Costello, he asked about loose talk, and I told him about Senator Kennedy and the drugs and the dancer. He said he’d never be caught dead in a scene like that. For one thing, he was a one-woman man. For another, as he put it, “You can’t trust those Irish cocksuckers.”
I wasn’t back in New York for long. It was back to Chicago. I was picked up at O’Hare Field and driven to the Palmer House in Downtown Chicago, where I met for the first time Sidney Korshak, a man who stayed with me for the rest of his life.
I was to learn that Sidney Korshak was the Outfit’s lawyer, a Chicago-born Jew who grew up in the Lawndale section of the Windy City’s west side. He was a brainy guy and attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison before earning his law degree at DePaul University. He was introduced to the Outfit by Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, Al Capone’s right-hand man—and said to have a greasy thumb because he was always counting Capone’s money. If you asked him, Guzik would say he was Capone’s business and financial advisor. In Sidney Korshak, Guzik saw a lawyer who could do the Outfit a lot of good, so he personally introduced Korshak to the top guys.
Sidney wasn’t the only power broker in the Korshak family. His younger brother Morris went into politics and became Chicago city treasurer and an Illinois state senator.
A list of Korshak’s clients is like a Mob Hall of Fame: Al Capone, Sam Giancana, Frank Nitti, Tony Accardo, and Moe Dalitz. His power spread from Chicago to Hollywood, where he counted among his famous clients Robert Evans, Warren Beatty, and Hugh Hefner.
Some of the most powerful men in the movie industry went to Korshak for their legal advice: Universal chief exec Jules Stein and MGM top dog Kirk Kerkorian. He represented both Edmund “Pat” Brown, and his son Edmund “Jerry” Brown, both of whom went on to become governor of California. Corporations he repped included Hollywood studios.
Korshak’s legend went beyond his legal skills, as he once simultaneously dated Jill St. John and Stella Stevens. Nice work if you can get it. And now he was in front of me with a slightly impatient expression on his face, which I found is common in lawyers.
He said, “You got a package for me?”
I said, “Yes.”
I handed it to him.
“Do you know what’s in it?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
He opened it up and pulled out a package of money. He took the money and put it in his pocket. I could tell by the wrapper that it was $10,000 in cash. Also in there were two contracts. He pushed one of the contracts toward me.
“You sign here,” he said.
I did.
“You know what this is?” he asked.
“No.”
“You have just retained me to be your lawyer, and that means that, from now on, everything we say to each other is privileged information and cannot be revealed, even in court under oath. I don’t care if the fucking FBI has tape now, they can’t use it. I know your name. No one else does. Keep it that way.”
I gulped.
While in Chicago, I learned the Outfit used a suburban Chicago hospital as a hideout. For years, during the 1960s, the Northlake Community Hospital served both sick people and wanted people. Fake patients included hit men, bank robbers, burglars, hijackers, and counterfeiters, all of whom checked in under a phony name and were discharged only after the heat was off.
The head of the hospital was Dr. Giulio Bruni, who was Tony Accardo’s personal physician. The hospital was more than just a quiet place to rest for hoods on the lam. There were all-night card games involving catered food, party girls, and free-flowing liquor. Among those known to play cards there were Sam DeStefano, Sam Giancana, Rocco Pranno, and Charles “Chuckie” Nicoletti.
Hospital employees must have been selectively observant, as no one ever reported unusual activity in private rooms under the supervision of Dr. Bruni, despite sex workers spending the night and delivery boys showing up at three in the morning with pizza.
Long before there were surveillance cameras everywhere, hospitals had them, with every entrance and exit to the hospital being monitored—it was next to impossible for a policeman or an enemy to get into the hospital without being noticed. If a cop did show up with the intent to investigate and possibly arrest someone, he was asked for a warrant. If he didn’t have one, he was kicked the hell out.
I was impressed by how sewed up Chicago was for the Outfit. The gangsters were supported by a well-greased machine of politicians, cops, and judges.
It was a quick hop from the Windy City to the Motor City. In Detroit I met Giacomo “Black Jack” Tocco, who’d been the boss there forever. He was different from the other bosses I’d met and would meet. For one thing, he completed college at the University of Detroit and earned a bachelor’s degree in finance.
