Playboy's History of Organized Crime Presents Part XII: The American Nightmare

With considerable justification, Italian-Americans were seething by the beginning of the Seventies. In the previous 20 years--since the Kefauver hearings and on through the McClellan investigation and the disclosures of Joe Valachi--Italians and gangsters had become almost synonymous. The American public was devouring Mario Puzo's The Godfather, first as a book and then as a movie, and was generally agreed that this must be the real inside story of the strange world inhabited by the sons of Italy, that everyone must be a Don Vito Corleone, his son Michael or someone owing allegiance to them. These suspicions were only reinforced by Gay Talese's Honor Thy Father, the tale of the family of Joe Bonanno and his son Bill.

It seemed that everyone was talking about the Mafia and La Cosa Nostra, and it seemed to Italian-Americans that everyone with an Italian name was suspected of membership in the underworld. Forget about Arturo Toscanini and Gian-Carlo Menotti, about painter Joseph Stella and architect Pietro Belluschi, about John Volpe and Joseph Alioto, about Joe DiMaggio and all the rest. Remember only Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese, Joe Profaci and Carlo Gambino, Al Capone and Albert Anastasia.

It was a sore point, and not only with the mass of honest Italian-Americans. The Mob, too, was distressed, for the public preoccupation with hoods whose names ended in a vowel seemed to stir the authorities to greater efforts against them. No member of the underworld was angrier than Joseph Colombo. He might be the youngest ruler in the councils of organized crime, head of a major family since 1963, when he was only 40; he might have a voice in Syndicate policy decisions and power over hundreds of hoodlums; he might have riches from gambling in Brooklyn and Queens, loan-sharking in Manhattan, thievery at the airports around New York, cigarette smuggling from the South and a dozen other rackets--wealth enough to own a home in Brooklyn and a country estate, replete with tennis court, swimming pool and horse track for the stable he had lately acquired (all on the salary of a real-estate salesman). But he deeply resented being legally harassed and socially snubbed as a wop mobster; for Colombo was, in every way, upward mobile.

As the Seventies began, everywhere Colombo turned, he found his ambitions blocked. His underworld peers considered him only a puppet of Gambino, the man who had put him on the throne of the old Profaci family and who had emerged as the first real and virtually unchallenged capo di tutti capi in the Italian Syndicate since the days of Luciano. And the law had marked him after he was picked up in 1967 in company with Gambino and Philadelphia boss Angelo Bruno at the House of Chan restaurant in Manhattan. He could hardly take a step without stumbling over a New York cop, an agent of the FBI or a Justice Department attorney.

These were, of course, the tribulations that most underworld leaders had long since learned to live with. But most of those leaders were, by then, aging men who had matured during the great underworld wars of Prohibition days, and their stoic acceptance of this surveillance had been bred by necessity. Colombo was a new kind of leader--young, American-born, impatient and easily frustrated.

In the spring of 1970, Colombo's son, Joseph, Jr., was arrested by Federal authorities. The charge: that he had melted down U.S. coins into silver ingots, whose value was greater than the face value of the dimes, quarters and half dollars. Colombo was certain the arrest was only part of the Government's constant badgering of him, that it was a frame (which was not unlikely, in view of the fact that the charge was dismissed when the Government's chief witness admitted in open court that he had lied in accusing young Colombo).

But Colombo sensed something else. The arrest could provide him with the opportunity to break free of Gambino, to challenge the decades-old cautions and dictates of the Syndicate, to become a man of stature not just in the shadowy world of crime but in the larger world of respectable society. With calculation born of frustration, he decided to parlay the arrest of his son into a major cause, to use it to play upon the legitimate grievances of all Italian-Americans over their universal Mafia image, and to seize the mantle of leadership in that cause.

Colombo, of course, was not the first Mob leader to sense that bitterness nor the first to exploit it. But in the past, the Mob had acted in its typically discreet way, as in the campaign against one of America's favorite television shows of the Sixties, The Untouchables, wherein Eliot Ness battled the Chicago mob in the days of Capone, wherein every hero was Anglo-Saxon and every villain Italian. With the covert backing of the Syndicate, an organization called the Federation of Italian-American Democratic Organizations was established under the leadership of Alfred Santangelo, a New York City congressman. The organization united the Italian-American community in a boycott of Chesterfield cigarettes, the program's sponsor; and in March 1961, Chesterfield bowed to the pressure and withdrew its backing of the show. The Untouchables died soon after, and so did the organization. In 1966 and 1967, another attempt was made to foster a better Italian-American image, this time with the formation of the American-Italian Anti-Defamation League, whose chairman was Frank Sinatra. But that project was aborted by the violent objections of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith over the use of a name so close and by disclosures of Sinatra's underworld associations.

There was a general feeling among many that the Italian-American community was just too disparate and lethargic to be galvanized into any kind of concerted, long-term effort. But Colombo thought otherwise. During the previous decade, the country had been swept by demonstrations--peaceful and violent--spreading from the civil-rights drives in the South to the ghettos of the cities, moving outward and encompassing the nation's youth in opposition to the Vietnam war and domestic social ills. The Italian community, basically conservative, had stood to one side, giving vent only to a kind of hard-hat opposition to radicalism. But Colombo had the feeling that the techniques and successes of the young rebels had not been lost on the Italians and that if they could be made to believe that their own self-image and social position were at stake, they could be mobilized and led into the streets.

The cause would be the blanket portrait of all Italians as gangsters and the harassment and prejudice of the authorities. And there was a most conspicuous target--the FBI. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau had belatedly "discovered" the Mob and had been pouring out a flood of publicity about La Cosa Nostra and Italian thugs. Within days of his son's arrest, Colombo and a small group of his friends, mainly members of his underworld family, showed up outside FBI headquarters on Manhattan's Upper East Side, picketing and chanting slogans. Pressure was put on Italian merchants and others to join the campaign, and soon nearly 5000 demonstrators were parading outside the FBI office almost every night, chanting, "Hi-dee-ho, the FBI has got to go." In a van was Colombo, stridently directing the chorus and giving loud orations to anyone who approached.

It was as though he had released a tightly coiled spring. Smiles greeted him as he walked through the Italian neighborhoods, unsolicited offers of help poured in. When the Government indicted Colombo for tax evasion, for perjury in lying about his criminal past when applying for a real-estate license, for contempt in refusing to answer questions under a grant of immunity before a grand jury, these actions seemed only to confirm his charges. Public support grew and Gambino and the other Mob leaders, watching from the side lines with some consternation, decided to give Colombo at least partial support.

Late in the spring, Colombo announced the formation of the Italian-American Civil Rights League to rally Italian-Americans: They could be proud of their heritage and in unity they would have the strength to fight the authorities, to combat the Italian-gangster stereotype. The league, Colombo said, would demonstrate its strength and the strength of the community at an Italian-American Unity Day rally on June 29, 1970, at New York's Columbus Circle.

The strength was there. On the day of the demonstration, Italian-owned stores and businesses all over New York closed--not a few because of the suggestion of soldiers in the Colombo family who had dropped by during preceding weeks. More than 50,000 people mobbed Columbus Circle, waving small red, green and white Italian flags and roaring approval of Colombo as he stood on a flagdecked platform and shouted, "I say there is a conspiracy against me, against all Italian-Americans.... But you and Joe Colombo are together today under God's eye ... and those who get in our way will feel His sting." For the politicians, it was an educative and unnerving experience. Italian-Americans were finally comporting themselves as an organized pressure group to be reckoned with and Colombo was emerging as a leader who could direct that pressure. Nearly every major politician in the city and the state sat, a little nervously, on the platform with him and spoke a few words of support. Within weeks, even Governor Nelson Rockefeller accepted honorary membership in the league. About the only politician of note to (continued on page 148)American Nightmare(continued from page 126) offer criticism was John Marchi, a conservative Staten Island Republican, himself of Italian descent. He was sure a Mob-backed betterment society was about the last thing needed, especially when it was offering the "preposterous theory that we can exorcise devils by reading them out of the English language.... I have only the feeling that the Italian-Americans as well as the larger community have been had."

Few paid much attention to Marchi's cautions or the cautions of The New York Times and other newspapers. Colombo had become a hero. He had emerged from the shadows and was glorying in adulation. Suddenly he was everywhere, giving interviews to reporters (though not to those with a background of investigating the Organization), appearing on television talk shows, attending public events. He was named man of the year by the Tri-Boro Post, a weekly newspaper; was guest of honor at a $125-a-plate dinner attended by 1450 people. The league flourished--Colombo claiming more than 150,000 members, who anted up an average of ten dollars each in dues. New York's Felt Forum was the scene of a huge and starstudded benefit, with entertainment provided by Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and others, for such unlikely guests as liberals Paul O'Dwyer and Richard Aurelio. The league reaped $500,000 from that affair, supposedly earmarked for such charities as a hospital and a clinic.

The league and Colombo began to pick targets and apply pressure. It paid off. Television commercials plugging products with Italian-accented actors crying, "Mama mia, datsa somma spicy meatball," vanished. Movie producer Al Ruddy agreed to eliminate all references to Mafia and Cosa Nostra from his adaptation of The Godfather and to donate the proceeds from opening night to a league-sponsored charity--an agreement that won him sharp criticism from The New York Times and from Marchi but that won him, as well, the benevolent cooperation of a covey of hoodlums in the making of the movie.

Colombo could, perhaps, take his greatest satisfaction in the way he made the Federal Government crawl. Attorney General John N. Mitchell announced that the Justice Department would no longer talk about the Mafia or La Cosa Nostra but would use only the bland, though perhaps more accurate, terms such as Syndicate, and a number of state governors made the same announcement. Even the FBI caved in; it, too, would drop the old appellations, and its approved television series, The FBI, would no longer have underworld characters with Italian names.

All was high adventure and success for Colombo. But as time passed, there was no such corresponding euphoria within the underworld hierarchy. For more than half a century, the guiding principle had been secrecy; success was predicated on anonymity. But there was Colombo, luxuriating in the sunlight, and the reflected rays were striking the other bosses.

Initially, Gambino had been loath to intervene. Colombo was his protégé, and if his league's efforts could take some of the heat off gangsters, so much the better. But while the league ended the official use of the terms Mafia and Cosa Nostra, it seemed to antagonize the Government into greater efforts against the Mob. Just as distressing to the other leaders were the rumors that Colombo was pocketing a goodly share of the league's income and not splitting with them. By early 1971, disenchantment was widespread.

Almost at this moment, "Crazy Joe" Gallo walked out of prison and moved to pick up the reins of his shattered faction of the Colombo family. Within weeks, Gallo was complaining loudly and bitterly that all the agreements he had made to end the Gallo-Profaci war of the early Sixties had been forgotten and that his people were no better off under Colombo than they had been under Profaci, against whom he'd rebelled. He demanded reparations, specifically $100,000 in damages and a fair split of the rackets. Colombo rejected the demands. Gallo began to mutter threats, and those threats found him some sympathetic allies. One was Carmine "The Snake" Persico, a major Colombo lieutenant, who had been fretfully watching the declining fortunes of the family as Colombo spent more and more time on league business. He would not be averse to using Gallo to unseat Colombo before dispensing with the unreliable killer.

Another sympathetic listener was Gambino. As the date for the second Unity Day, June 28, 1971, approached, signs were mounting that it would not be the happy event of the year before. Gambino's men began to withdraw from offices in the league, and so did the men of the other leaders. Tony Scotto, Tony Anastasia's son-in-law and himself now a major power on the waterfront, said he had no intention of showing up on the platform as he had in 1970 and, further, this year he was not going to give dockworkers the day off with pay. There were troubles in the Italian neighborhoods, too. Colombo soldiers telling shopkeepers to close for the day and post signs announcing the rally were followed by Gallo forces and those of other leaders warning the merchants to stay open and take the posters down. A number of Colombo canvassers were even beaten and chased out of the neighborhoods.

If Colombo was worried, he did not show it. On the morning of June 28, he turned up early with a crew of bodyguards and well-wishers, wandered through the noisy crowd--noticeably smaller than the year before--shaking hands and talking animatedly. Suddenly, a black man, Jerome A. Johnson, posing as a newspaper photographer, approached. A step away from Colombo, he stopped, pulled out a pistol and fired three shots directly at Colombo's head. The stunned bodyguards reacted after only a moment, firing directly at Johnson.

In the pools of blood where Johnson lay dead and Colombo critically wounded (he did not die, though his brain was so severely damaged that he became little more than a vegetable), Unity Day and the Italian-American Civil Rights League were shattered beyond repair.

Behind the attack on Colombo, both his friends and the authorities were sure, was Gallo, using the friendships he had cultivated with black convicts while in prison to recruit an assassin who would not be connected to him. Gallo was picked up, questioned and then released. For the next several months, he stayed inside his house in Brooklyn, refusing to show himself and so become a target.

But early in 1972, Gallo's life took a sudden turn. He divorced his wife and within months married a young hairdresser with a daughter of her own. And he began to cultivate a new circle of friends totally alien to the underworld, show-business celebrities such as Jerry and Marta Ohrbach (with whom he was considering collaboration on an autobiography), Neil Simon, producer-director Hal Prince, actress Joan Hackett and others. He spent much of his time at the Ohrbachs' home in Greenwich Village, went with them to Broadway shows, to Elaine's, the "in" watering hole of the literary establishment, to Sardi's. He played chess, talked about Camus, reflected on life. He provided, said one of his new friends, "refreshing insight and intelligence in a world of clichés."

Though Gallo protested to his new friends that he had left the old world behind, there were indications to the contrary. According to underworld rumors, while he was frequenting the intellectual salons, he was also trying to muscle his way into some of the rackets controlled by Persico now that Carmine "The Snake" had been sent away on a 14-year stretch for hijacking. In the underworld, and particularly in the remnants of the Colombo mob, it was open season on Crazy Joe. But all efforts to lure him into an ambush failed--until April 7, 1972. Only three weeks remarried, Gallo decided to celebrate his 43rd birthday by taking his new bride, her ten-year-old daughter, his sister and a bodyguard named Peter Diapoulas on the rounds, (continued on page 204)American Nightmare(continued from page 148) touring the Copacabana and other night spots and winding up, about four in the morning, at Umbertos Clam House on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. Suddenly, the door burst open and four men entered with drawn pistols. Gallo looked up, snarled, "You son of a bitch," and received two slugs in reply. He stumbled out of his seat and out onto the street. Another slug hit him and he collapsed, dead.

At his funeral three days later, his sister stood over the coffin and vowed, "The streets are going to run red with blood, Joey!" They did. In the next weeks, a dozen bodies were found scattered around New York, victims of Gallo revenge and Colombo justice. Among them were two innocent victims. One gunman walked into a Manhattan restaurant, the Neopolitan Noodle, with a contract on Persico aides; but moments earlier, they had left their place at the bar, and when the killer fired, his victims were two merchants, Sheldon Epstein and Max Tekelch, who had dropped by for dinner with their wives.

To some observers, the murders of the innocents, even the murder of Gallo, were signs of just how far and into what a sorry state the Italian Syndicate had fallen. That it was still resorting to violence was bad enough; that innocents were victims was worse, and worse yet was the whole bungle of the Gallo affair. Within two weeks of Gallo's murder, Joseph Luparelli, a sometime bodyguard and chauffeur to Joseph Yacovelli--who, along with Vincent Aloi, had taken control of the Colombo family after the shooting of Colombo and the jailing of Persico--turned himself in to FBI agents in California and told the whole story.

It seems that he happened to be inside Umbertos when Gallo drove up. Immediately, he hurried to another restaurant up the street, a hangout for Colombo soldiers. There he found Carmine Di Biase, Philip Gambino (a nephew of Carlo's), Alphonse Indelicato, Dominic Trichera and Joseph Gorgone and told them of his discovery.

"What's he doing there?" Di Biase asked.

"I don't know," Luparelli replied.

"They're starting to eat."

Di Biase made some calls and got a go-ahead from Yacovelli and Aloi. In the good old days, at that moment Luparelli would have been told to go home, turn on the television and otherwise occupy himself innocently. After all, he had fingered Gallo and he might have been spotted; and if he were sent home, he would have no useful knowledge of the events that later occurred. But Di Biase and his friends took Luparelli along with them, and they apparently realized their mistake almost as soon as they saw Gallo lying in his own blood. They drove Luparelli to a hide-out in Nyack, New York, to wait until the heat blew over; and, during the next few days, they conferred several times with Aloi. It gradually began to dawn on Luparelli that maybe his friends didn't trust him anymore, especially when his food began to taste funny, like arsenic, and he became violently ill. (The question, of course, is why the subtlety, why he wasn't simply disposed of in the traditional fashion.) Luparelli decided not to eat any more dinners in Nyack. He slipped away, fled to California, turned himself in and told the whole story. The results: a grand-jury investigation, the indictment of some of the killers, the jailing of Aloi for refusing to talk to the grand jury and the disappearance of Yacovelli. It also resulted in the shattering of the Colombo family.

• • •

But there were more serious consequences to the shootings that began with the attempt on Colombo's life. Violence inevitably causes trouble; informers surface, talking to protect their own lives; front-page headlines and editorials demand police action; investigations are stepped up. All conspire to interfere with the orderly conduct of Mob business. Thus, the result of the war between Gallo and Colombo was a marked increase in pressure on the Mob, and that, in combination with the natural inroads of age, began to decimate the leadership. A major vacuum was being created at the top of the Syndicate, one that would be hard to fill. The prison cells of the Federal penitentiaries were filling up with mafiosi, young and old, as the result of Federal efforts that had begun nearly a decade before under Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Those mobsters not incarcerated were deluged in a paper flood of indictments and subpoenas, were hounded by constant surveillance, wire taps and bugs, to the extent that many were afraid to even whisper anywhere but in the middle of a vacant lot. Still others discovered that their riches, power and influence were no shield against the ills of advancing age.

New Jersey mobsters such as Angelo "Gyp" DeCarlo, once boss of the state's loan-sharking and gambling, went up for 12 years (only to be freed after 33 months, when President Nixon granted him Executive clemency. DeCarlo returned home on a stretcher, for a time picked up the rule and then, ten months later, died of cancer), and he was followed by such other Garden State mobsters as Sam "The Plumber" DeCavalcante, Phil Rastelli and "Bayonne Joe" Zicarelli. New England's Raymond Patriarca went to jail for a time, and so did Philadelphia's Bruno.

The Chicago organization, second only to the combined forces in New York, was in disarray. In the mid-Sixties, Sam Giancana had retired to Acapulco. The leadership passed to such old-timers as Anthony "Big Tuna" Accardo, Paul "The Waiter" Ricca and Felix "Milwaukee Phil" Alderisio, to such Giancana friends as Sam "Teetz" Battaglia, Fiore "Fifi" Buccieri and Jackie Cerone, to such now-aging onetime Young Turks as Joseph "Doves" Aiuppa, Charley "Chuck" Nicoletti, Gus "Slim" Alex and Sam De Stefano, the king of Chicago "juice" (loan-shark) men and a special pet of Ricca's.

Except for Accardo, who seems impervious to all efforts to nail him and who has remained at or near the top in Chicago since the days of Capone, the other leaders and would-be leaders have all suffered since Giancana's departure. Battaglia went to prison in 1967 on a 15-year extortion rap; in 1973, he was granted clemency, but only because he was dying of cancer. By 1970, it looked as though Cerone was about to emerge as the city's strong man; but that year, he went to Federal prison on a five-year gambling conviction. A year later, Alderisio was dead and, in another year, so, too, was Ricca, of a heart attack at 74. "I lost the best friend a man could have," mourned Accardo.

Indeed, Big Tuna's good friends seemed to be falling all around him. Buccieri went from lung cancer in the summer of 1973. De Stefano went, too, only not of natural causes; for his imperious and violent ways (among the several murders credited to him was that of his brother; it was Sam's way of helping him kick a narcotics habit) had earned him some unforgiving enemies, especially among those close to Giancana. When De Stefano was indicted for murder and the rumor spread that he might write his memoirs, his time had come. One morning in April 1973, he was cleaning his garage when somebody walked in with a shotgun.

Even those who remained showed little stomach for the hard times that seemed to lie ahead. Aiuppa, ruler of the Cicero rackets, began telling everyone that he was past 65 and wanted only to retire. Alex began spending more and more time in Florida, insisting that he, too, was retiring. But, in light of all the troubles, he has been forced to pick up at least some of the reins in Chicago. Only the younger Nicoletti seems, in 1974, anxious to succeed to the rule when Accardo, now nearing 70, goes; but he is only in his 40s and his elders consider him a little young for the top spot.

The pains of the Chicago mob, however, pale beside those suffered in New York. None of the five major crime families has escaped serious trouble and some have been shattered beyond repair, to the point where there have been serious internal discussions about merging all into one or, at most, two families.

Should that occur, three families are almost certain to disappear--those led in the glory days by Profaci, Bonanno and Tommy Lucchese--and a fourth, once the most powerful under Luciano, Genovese and Frank Costello, all now dead, may not survive much longer.

With Colombo incapacitated and such potential successors as Persico, Yacovelli and Aloi either in prison or vanished, the fortunes of that family are in sorry shape. As Dennis Dillon, head of the Federal Strike Force in New York, put it, "The Colombo family has not been put out of operation, but we see the end in sight."

The old Bonanno family is little better off. When Bonanno finally retired to Tucson, Gambino assigned a onetime Lucchese lieutenant to restore order. Natale Evola had notable success, for a time. He reconciled the warring factions and expanded the family's control in the New York Garment District, both through the capture of more once-legitimate concerns and by organizing the Garment Truckers Association. But in the summer of 1973, the 66-year-old Evola died of cancer. No one else merited the respect that he had earned, and every time Gambino seemed about to tap somebody, such as Rastelli or Zicarelli, his potential nominee somehow wound up in prison.

In even more desperate condition is the old Lucchese outfit. On October 16, 1972, beaming Brooklyn district attorney Eugene Gold called in the press and announced, "We have pierced the veil of organized crime, stripping away the insulation that has hidden and protected many of the most important people in organized crime." Well, that was stretching things a little, but Gold had certainly done something. At the moment he was boasting, more than 1000 New York cops were sweeping through the city, handing out 677 subpoenas to such mobsters as Gambino, Carmine "Mr. Gribbs" Tramunti and Paul Vario, to more than 100 cops on the Mob's payroll and to a host of politicians. It was the result of one of the most successful clandestine operations in the war on crime.

Almost a year earlier, Gold's office, in cooperation with police, had begun surveillance of a Mob hangout in Brooklyn, with police disguised as Christmastree salesmen setting up shop across the street (and making a tidy profit, too). That surveillance led to the discovery of a Mob command post, in a trailer parked in the center of the Bargain Auto Parts junk yard. The gray-and-blue trailer, ringed by a 14-foot chain-link fence, topped by barbed wire and guarded by watchmen and two attack dogs, was headquarters for Vario, consigliere in the old Lucchese outfit now run by Tramunti, himself one of Gambino's oldest and closest friends. In the ceiling of the trailer, Gold's experts installed a sophisticated miniature listening device. They also tapped the three phones and, from a building across the street, undercover agents trained motion-picture and still cameras on the trailer. During the next 11 months, they amassed 1,622,600 feet of tape (including 21,600 feet from court-ordered wire taps) and took 36,000 feet of color film and 54,000 telephoto pictures. On that tape and film were the voices and photos of most of the important mobsters in the East, a number of policemen and detectives and a string of politicians and judges.

"We have learned," Gold declared, "of deals involving the sale of narcotics, extortion and loan-sharking, corruption, coercion, bookmaking, policy, assault and robbery, burglaries, counterfeiting, hijacking, receiving stolen property, forgery, possession and sale of weapons, labor racketeering, stolen-auto rings, untaxed cigarettes, insurance frauds, arson of businesses, the cutting up of autos and boats, prostitution and violation of alcohol-beverage-control laws." He had also discovered, he said, more than 200 previously legitimate businesses, running "the gamut of business activity in this city," into which the Mob had moved.

What Gold intended to do with all this was quickly apparent. A grand jury was impaneled to hear those subpoenaed.

There, under grants of immunity, they were asked to tell about the underworld. Gold, of course, expected few to talk. But under New York's stiff immunity law, if they didn't testify, they would go to jail. One way or another, Gold was going to send a lot of top hoods to prison. Which is just what he did. Tramunti went up for three years for contempt, to which was soon added another term for perjury growing out of a stock-fraud trial. Vario found himself buried under six indictments ranging from income-tax evasion to hijacking. And the old Lucchese family found itself virtually leaderless, more and more taking its orders from Gambino.

Then there was the old Luciano-Genovese-Costello outfit, once the most powerful. From the time Genovese went to prison, where he died, the outfit's fortunes and power steadily declined under the joint rule of Gerardo "Gerry" Catena and Tommy "Tommy Ryan" Eboli. For a time, there were indications of a renaissance as Anthony DiLorenzo seemed to be moving toward the top. He was one of the new breed of mobsters, though at the beginning it looked as though he would never be much more than a thug (he had served one term in prison for assault with a baseball bat). But while behind bars, DiLorenzo devoted himself to books and emerged as a man with a cultivated manner and considerable sophistication; he had even learned to speak acceptable English. During the Sixties, he amassed power and riches as the ruler of the Metropolitan Import Truckmen's Association, which had a near monopoly on hauling air freight, gasoline and food to Kennedy Airport. By 1969, he was making motions to spread that monopoly across the country, and he might well have done just that in concert with his friends in the Teamsters Union. But DiLorenzo soon found himself in a lot of trouble. He was deeply enmeshed in one of the Syndicate's newer and most important rackets, stolen securities; the Government was able to tie him into a deal involving more than $1,000,000 worth of purloined IBM stock and thereby send him away for ten years. In 1972, DiLorenzo was given permission by prison authorities to visit an outside dentist, without any guards along. He never returned and there has been no word on him since, though there have been plenty of rumors: that he was killed by rivals; that he has remained underground, helping guide the Mob in its deeper penetration of the securities markets and other rackets; that he has skipped to Europe.

With DiLorenzo gone, there were no immediate rivals to Catena and Eboli. Early in 1970, however, Catena was summoned before a New Jersey investigating committee, granted immunity and ordered to tell all he knew about the Organization. He refused and wound up in prison for contempt. At nearly 70 and in failing health, the chances for Catena to resume a major role appear slim.

Catena's imprisonment left the hottempered Eboli in command. It also made him the subject of intense scrutiny by half a dozen agencies, though by pleading a serious heart ailment, he was able to avoid testifying. But worse for him was the fact that he was falling into disfavor both with his own lieutenants and with Gambino. Though his own personal rackets--night clubs, Greenwich Village bars catering to homosexuals, music and records, jukeboxes and vending machines--prospered, he showed little inclination to share the profits or lead his troops with any vigor. The grumbling in the ranks grew louder and by the winter of 1972, the family's captains were just about ready to turn to Gambino for help, to seek the ouster of Eboli by one means or another and his replacement by Francesco "Funzi" Tieri, close friend to Gambino and himself a longtime power on the waterfront and in the Garment District.

Gambino favored deposing Eboli. With Tieri as head of the outfit, Gambino's influence would be vastly increased; the leaders of all the families in New York would be men who were his close friends, men who owed their positions and so their allegiance to him. At that moment, only Eboli remained independent of Gambino, and Eboli was sometimes heard saying loudly that, as heir to Luciano and Genovese, the right of command was his.

But there was another reason to topple Eboli. According to some Federal investigators, he had cost Gambino and other leaders close to $4,000,000 in a botched narcotics deal.

At least since the mid-Sixties, narcotics had played a diminishing role in the Mob's activities. Common sense had led to a decision to heed the advice of men like Costello that the profits from junk were not worth the risks. The entrapment and imprisonment of Genovese, Big John Ormento, Carmine Galante, even Evcla and a number of other high-ranking mobsters, had driven that lesson home. Moreover, the base for sale of narcotics lay in the central cities, and by the mid-Sixties, that territory had become the bastion of minority-group hoodlums who thought they ought to control whatever rackets fed on their people. White narcotics distributors and pushers were regularly beaten, robbed and thrown out; white numbers runners and even the smaller policy banks were subjected to the same indignities. There were some in the Syndicate who wanted a war to put down the obstreperous minorities; wiser men like Gambino realized that this was a war that could not be won. Where possible, the minority racketeers were taken into partnership or were sold the business or, when it was the only recourse, were ceded it outright. These new racketeers quickly entrenched themselves, making their own connections for narcotics in Europe and in Latin America, setting up their own pipelines and dealerships and giving rise to what became known as the Cuban Mafia. Of course, they followed the same route in the numbers racket.

By late 1973, though there were rumors that the Mob had decided to move back in, the minorities were pretty solidly in control. On the lists of major narcotics dealers compiled by police departments, the number of Italian or Syndicate names declined and more and more blacks, Cubans and other minority independents appeared. They were men such as Maryland's Frank Matthews, who surfaced after the killing of one of his couriers, a black Maryland legislator named James A. "Turk" Scott, then under indictment for transporting $10,000,000 worth of raw heroin and rumored to be talking; Thomas "Fats" Burnside, a major cocaine distributor in Harlem; Charles Ashley, who ran a major cutting factory on Manhattan's West Side; and Leonides Suarez, one of the top junk men in Chicago. In numbers, the big names increasingly were those of men like "Spanish Raymond" Marquez in Harlem.

But for the Syndicate, retreat from the day-to-day narcotics business did not mean total withdrawal; the Mob continued to bank-roll major narcotics shipments, which were then turned over to the new distributors. It was just this kind of deal that Eboli took to Gambino and the other leaders in the summer of 1971. One of Eboli's friends, and a sometime ally of the old Lucchese family, was a Bronx bagel baker named Louis Cirillo. As it happened, according to Federal authorities, Cirillo was also the largest narcotics wholesaler in the United States, the American representative of an international syndicate that had poured heroin with a street value of more than $300,000,000 into the States from France. In need of cash to pay for one massive shipment, Cirillo turned to Eboli for financing. The cash he needed amounted to about $4,000,000, too much for Eboli to swing on his own, so he cut Gambino and the other leaders in on the deal. All went well until one of the smugglers, a Paris interior decorator named Roger Preiss, turned Federal informant. His testimony earned Cirillo a 25-year prison term and cost the Mob its entire investment. Narcotics agents found more than $1,000,000 cached around Cirillo's home and there were rumors that millions more had been buried for safekeeping. Gambino and the other leaders blamed Eboli for their loss and asked him to make good. He refused.

Eboli, early in the summer of 1972, seemed unaware that he had fallen from grace. But that fact was driven home with finality in the early-morning hours of July 16. His bodyguard-chauffeur, Joseph Sternfeld, had driven him from his newly purchased $150,000 mansion near Fort Lee, New Jersey, to spend the evening in Brooklyn with one of several mistresses. As Eboli emerged from her home at one in the morning, somebody was waiting in a red-and-yellow van. That somebody put five slugs in his face and neck from a distance of five feet. Sternfeld insisted that although he was there, opening the Cadillac's rear door for Eboli, he hit the pavement at the sound of the first shot and never saw who was doing the shooting. That tale was greeted with considerable skepticism and a perjury indictment.

With Eboli dead, Gambino's friend Tieri was in command. "He's a real class guy," one Federal agent said, "a real money-maker, one of the classiest gangsters in the New York City area." Maybe. But the move to the top put Tieri out in the open and, within a year, grand juries had twice indicted him--for extortion and loan-sharking conspiracy.

All of which left Gambino securely on the throne of the Italian Syndicate, at least in New York; but Gambino and his family had not escaped the official heat. In 1970, a New York grand jury indicted his chief aide, underboss and rumored successor. Anniello Dellacroce, for refusing to testify about gangster infiltration of businesses. He got a year for that and, before the sentence was up, five more years were tacked on for income-tax evasion. With Dellacroce away, it looked for a time as though Joe Manfredi might be moving up; but in 1972, Federal agents got him for heroin conspiracy and put him away for 30 years.

As for Gambino himself, the aging ruler, now past 70, might still give the orders and make the plans, but probably not for long. He has been stripped of his citizenship and ordered deported to his native Sicily. It is unlikely that the order will ever be carried out; he has been in and out of the hospital with a deteriorating heart condition, which, doctors say, leaves him very little time. Most of his days now are spent in bed in the safety of his tightly guarded home on Long Island.

So, much of the old leadership of the Italian-dominated section of the Syndicate is at the moment of its last hurrah. The same is true elsewhere. Meyer Lansky, so long the shadowy puppeteer of organized crime, has not escaped the ravages of age nor avoided discovery. After years of intensifying probes of the Syndicate, Federal authorities finally realized that the Organization was not a private club open only to Italians. Wherever they turned, they stumbled across Lansky, not as a hanger-on or mere associate but as the man whose fertile brain generated the most imaginative ideas and through whom was channeled much of the Mob's cash flow. This was especially true with gambling, the base for all the Organization's rackets. Gambling provided 20 to 30 billion dollars a year, perhaps half the gross income, and much of this was funneled through Lansky to other rackets, into legitimate business for take-overs and out of the country into Swiss bank accounts, where the Mob's fortune is estimated to exceed $300,000,000.

So pervasive was Lansky's influence that by 1970, the Justice Department had set up a special 70-man strike force, number 18, concerned only with him; as one agent put it, to "learn where his money is and who his successors will be." Initially. Lansky showed little concern with this sudden attention. He and his wife, Thelma, settled into a luxurious apartment on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach and nightly he took long walks with his little dog, certain that his own men and friendly police would protect him from any dangers. Clandestinely, he worked to legalize gambling in the resort city--an effort that looked as though it would succeed until his role was revealed and a voter rebellion defeated the proposition.

In February 1970, Lansky suddenly disappeared from Miami Beach, turning up a few days later in Acapulco, in room 993 of the Acapulco Hilton, next door to Moses Polakoff, for decades the legal advisor to Lansky, Luciano and other top leaders. In town was a host of other American and Canadian racketeers. They had come, they explained, to bask in the warm Mexican sun and play a little golf. It was merely a coincidence that they were there at the same time, just as it was only a coincidence that a few years earlier, many of the same men had turned up simultaneously at La Costa Country Club outside San Diego, the resort community that is home and headquarters of gambling giant Moe Dalitz.

In Acapulco, the mobsters did more than enjoy the climate. They also enjoyed the hospitality of Leo Berkovitch, an old racketeer who had settled in the Mexican resort some years before; and who should drop by the Berkovitch home on occasion but Chicago's Giancana, another recently arrived resident. According to reports, they talked about expansion of gambling in Latin America and in Europe, especially Yugoslavia, where Marshal Tito was being urged to turn the resort coast into another Monaco, and about mounting campaigns to legalize gambling throughout Canada and the United States.

When the meetings ended early in March, Lansky flew back to Miami. His absence had been noted; authorities were waiting for him and in his luggage they found a bottle of phenobarbital for which he had no prescription. The pills, he explained, were medication for his ulcers. While no Federal law had been violated, a Florida law had been and Lansky was arrested and tried for illegal possession. The trial was a farce and he was acquitted.

But the mere fact of the trial, combined with major efforts to nail him on other charges, had an effect on Lansky. Within weeks of his acquittal, he and his wife boarded a plane for Israel and settled into the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv. He then announced that he was claiming Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, which grants citizenship to anyone born of a Jewish mother. Through the years, Lansky had tried to ensure his welcome with massive donations to Israel, to hospitals, to the university and to other institutions there, and with investments in a number of industries. Now he offered to plow millions more into the state. He did not, however, abandon his old interests in the United States; a regular courier run was set up, with messengers arriving with money and reports and departing with orders.

Lansky, however, was an embarrassment to Israel, especially as his troubles in the United States mounted. In March 1971, a Federal grand jury in Miami subpoenaed him. He ignored the summons and a warrant for his arrest was issued. Two weeks later, the grand jury indicted him and his friends Morris Landsburgh and Sam Cohen, owners of Eden Roc and other Miami Beach hotels, for skimming $14,000,000 from the Flamingo in Las Vegas (the amount was eventually raised to $36,000,000). A year later, in June 1972, Lansky was indicted once more, this time along with his gambling associate Dino Cellini, for income-tax evasion. On the basis of evidence supplied by Mafia informant Vincent "Fat Vinnie" Teresa, the Government charged that Lansky and Cellini were really the men behind Colony Sporting Club in London, ostensibly run by onetime movie star George Raft. The Government also claimed they had established Travel and Resorts Enterprises, Inc., in Miami to organize gambling junkets to the Colony and other foreign casinos.

Lansky was not about to return to face the multiplying indictments. He stayed in Israel, seemingly relaxed, talking on occasion with visiting reporters and cultivating acquaintances in the American colony. Said one, "It seems that he is an avid buff of American history and, while he was not able to enter the American Cultural Center of the U. S. Embassy for fear of arrest, he asked me to take out books for him. That relationship had led me to speak with the man on several different occasions at great length. During one of our discussions, one of the facts that emerged was his desire to engage in acts of homosexuality, even though he was married."

American authorities began pressing Israel for Lansky's expulsion and in 1972, the Israelis agreed to toss him out. But Lansky, citing the Law of Return, appealed all the way to the Israeli supreme court and his position won considerable backing from people who were determined that the Law of Return should remain inviolate. But the tide began to turn against him. Lansky offered $1,000,000 to Israel if he were permitted to remain; the offer was rejected, the supreme court denied his appeal and he was ordered to leave.

On November 5, 1972, Lansky began his long voyage home, hoping that somewhere along the way, some country would accept his offer of a million-dollar contribution and grant him sanctuary. But after two days of jet travel that carried him from Tel Aviv to Switzerland to Buenos Aires and through South America, Lansky was back in Miami. There he was met and arrested by a small army of FBI agents, Treasury men and local police, and later released on bonds totaling $650,000.

The Lansky who returned was not the Lansky who had departed more than two years before. Now he was an old and tired man past 70. He was also a very sick man, with a serious heart condition. Almost as soon as he was released, he checked into a hospital. In March 1973, his condition was critical enough to require open-heart surgery, and the Lansky who emerged was, physically at least, only a shadow of what he once had been.

And there were the charges pending against him. In June 1973, he was convicted and sentenced to a year and a day for refusing to answer the call of the grand jury. A month later, he had a victory; a jury in Miami acquitted him of the income-tax-evasion charges. Ahead, however, still lies the often-postponed trial in Las Vegas for skimming and, when that is through, the Government promises to tie Lansky in legal knots for the rest of his life.

• • •

No matter the ultimate disposition of the legal tangles of Lansky, Gambino and other top mobsters, one thing is clear. They are old and sick men and they have little time left. But when they finally die, they will leave behind an organization or a group of cooperating organizations that, despite the severe pressures and successful inroads of the law, are still flourishing and, indeed, moving into new and even more lucrative businesses.

A natural target for Mob invasion has been pornography. In the early days, it promised more hassles than profits. It was a tiny business, mainly one of selling a few books and photographs under the counters of sleazy stores and peddling a few stag films for college-fraternity and social-club smokers. Unlike liquor, where even Prohibition could not kill public taste or demand, dirty books and films had never had more than a subterranean market. But several ambiguous Supreme Court decisions of the Sixties left local officials bewildered over just what, if anything, constituted pornography and what might have "redeeming social value." This meant that a long-suppressed commodity now had the virtues of being a forbidden fruit, technically illegal but difficult to prosecute, and in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major cities, porno bookshops, peep shows and hard-core movies soon began to flourish on the edges of the law. The mobsters quickly saw the gold in paper and celluloid and moved in, and a lot of familiar names were soon bank-rolling the burgeoning porn industry. In the background, and sometimes even close to the front, were John Franzese, a captain in the Colombo family; Michael Zaffarano of the Evola family; Ettore Zappi, a next-door neighbor and close associate of Gambino's; and his son, Anthony Zappi, secretary-treasurer of a Long Island local of the Teamsters.

The racket was one that suited the Mob's needs. The business was high profit, quick turnover and strictly cash. A film might cost only $100 or so to make but could be sold by the thousands for $30 a reel; a deck of playing cards or a stack of photographs cost only a quarter or so to turn out but could be sold for five dollars; a publication costing less than 50 cents a copy to produce might sell for ten dollars. And this racket provided a means of hiding the income from other rackets merely by inflating the proceeds from the movie theaters and bookstores and the rest.

Only slightly less profitable has been cigarette bootlegging. It seemed a good idea back in 1964, when the U. S. Surgeon General started warning people about lung cancer, to give up cigarettes, to kill smoking by putting a heavy tax on the cigarettes; and if the smokers persisted, at least the states would have a new and vast source of revenue. That, at least, was the reasoning, particularly in the Northeast, where New York and other states began doubling the tax. By 1974, tax in New York City, for instance, had reached 26 cents a pack; which meant that the price of a pack was 60 cents or more, or over five dollars a carton.

But in North Carolina, the producing center, there was no state tax on cigarettes until 1969. It was a situation made to order for the Mob: Buy cigarettes by the truckload in North Carolina at two dollars or less a carton, haul them to New York by the back roads, there stock them in Mob-controlled warehouses, add counterfeit tax stamps and then peddle them cut-rate through such Mob-controlled outlets as Eboli's Trayan, Inc. With the average price of a carton $3.99 from the Mob, there were plenty of customers.

Despite stepped-up efforts by police, leading to dozens of arrests and the seizure of millions of untaxed bootleg butts, the business still rolls along. New York officials now estimate that as many as 400,000,000 packs of cigarettes, between a third and a half of all the cigarettes sold in the New York metropolitan area, are bootlegged. The cost to the city and the state: $85,000,000 annually in lost taxes. The greatest danger for the bootleggers, it's turned out, is the same that was faced by Prohibition rumrunners--hijacking by rival mobs. But even that danger has receded since the Organization entrenched itself in the business and forced out most of the independents. And, as states across the country have followed the Eastern example in boosting cigarette taxes, the butt bootleggers have only expanded their operations nationwide.

In the main, though, pornography, cigarette bootlegging, even the infiltration of the entertainment business (through payola and control of night clubs, music publishing and bookings), are variations on the old-time rackets, using the same techniques and even some of the same personnel.

There are, however, other and more modern rackets that have tended to elude the old-time mobsters with their limited knowledge and sophistication. That violent breed is dying off and a new kind of gangster is now moving into power. Some are the sons and relatives of the old leaders; others have names that now mean nothing to law-enforcement agencies or the public. Some, like DiLorenzo, have gone to jail, but many have never held a gun, knocked over a store, committed a violent crime or seen the inside of a cell. Almost all, like Puzo's fictionalized Michael Corleone, are American-born, raised in the middle class, often college educated and versed in modern business techniques. In speech, manner and outward appearance, they are indistinguishable from the sons of the respectable; they could be, and sometimes are, young lawyers, bankers, stockbrokers and junior executives climbing the ladder of corporate success. They leave a suburban home in the morning and commute to the office of a legitimate business. But that office is a front behind which they engage in highly sophisticated crime. Without them, it is doubtful that the plundering of the country's and the world's financial and investment markets over the past decade could have been contemplated or carried out so successfully.

Wall Street money has always appealed to the underworld. But Wall Street has always been the stronghold of the very rich, who might buy bootleg Scotch and visit casinos on vacation but, the mobsters were certain, would never do real business with racketeers. Except for a few bucket-shop operations designed to bilk gullible investors, Wall Street remained virgin territory. It took the new, young and sophisticated racketeers to deflower it. By the mid-Sixties, they had taught the entrenched rulers of the Organization that Wall Street cash was of little immediate importance. The real treasure was those pieces of parchment with the fancy engraved lettering--stock certificates, bonds, letters of credit, certificates of deposit and all the rest.

Securities, after all, could be used as collateral for large bank loans, thereby providing legitimate and tax-deductible funds for corporate take-overs or for countless other purposes. Thus, the $195,000 loan obtained by one Charles L. Lewis of Atlanta from Charles "Bebe" Rebozo's Key Biscayne Bank in 1968, using 900 shares of IBM stock as collateral. When Rebozo went to sell the stock, it turned out to have been stolen. Indicted later for the theft were two Lansky gambling associates, Gilbert "The Brain" Beckley and Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, a New York hood, strong-arm man and major loan shark.

Securities, of course, can also provide the perfect cover for laundering cash deposited in Swiss banks, serving as collateral for obtaining that money in the form of loans. Or, by lending the securities to a financially desperate company, which can then use them to inflate its balance sheet and so lure new investment capital, the mobsters opened new doors to the executive suite.

As for acquiring securities, this was fairly simple. One way was to counterfeit them, and the Mob had plenty of engravers, sources of good paper and expert printers, some of whom got their experience turning out ration stamps during World War Two. Another, and perhaps easier way, was simply to steal them. It was not necessary to hold up a stock messenger. The denizens of Wall Street were just as corruptible as businessmen and politicians uptown, and by the late Sixties, loan sharks--not the venomous kind that infest the waterfront but an outwardly more genteel crew--were swarming through the financial district, getting brokerage-house clerks into their debt and their clutches. Given the option of a beating, financial or physical, or a little certificate looting, most chose the latter, and under the tutelage of the new mobsters, the recruited clerks learned how to steal with considerable sophistication.

The clerks were taught not only how to purloin stock certificates but also how to destroy the microfilm records of such stocks and bonds in their brokerage houses. Gerald Martin Zelmanowitz, a Mob courier and front man in the stock racket who later turned FBI informant, declared that at one point, Mob-controlled clerks made away with more than $1,000,000 worth of securities from Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, the nation's largest brokerage firm, and simultaneously destroyed the microfilms. Even when Merrill Lynch discovered that stock was missing, it couldn't determine which stock.

The low-paid clerks were not the only ones to fall into the Organization's web. In order to put stolen securities to use, to move them from the United States to Europe, it is necessary to fill out Internal Revenue forms showing prior ownership, the date the stock was sold and to whom and the price paid. If the transfer is made from an American owner to a foreigner, a tax of 18 percent is assessed. Circumventing all this was no problem. "I have," Zelmanowitz told a Senate subcommittee, "at various times received as much as 3000 such certificates under probably 20 different names and have received the signature guarantees from commercial banks or blank certificates with no amount of securities, no purchase price, no date of purchase entered upon them."

Wherever he turned, Zelmanowitz--and others working the same field--found willing collaborators. On his payroll, he said, at $1000 a week were agents of the Internal Revenue Service who falsified documents for him. He had allies at First National City Bank and Chase Manhattan Bank, the country's second and third largest banks (after California's Bank of America), and all it cost him was an occasional $50 or $100 to "induce a bank vice-president to guarantee in blank any name you so desire to place on these certificates." The brokerage houses, too, assisted the Mob with the necessary forms, even helped trade the securities on the market. Executives at Hayden, Stone, at Bache and Co., at Eastman, Dillon and many others, according to Zelmanowitz, "close their eyes to the fact that we would engage in a criminal activity. The inducement of great commissions being paid to them seems to have been the only motivating factor."

The vast bulk of the stolen and counterfeit securities eventually find their way across the Atlantic, where they form one of the bases for laundering funds from other rackets for return to America. "Banks in Basel, Geneva and Lausanne as well as brokerage firms and banks in Belgium were necessary for our manipulations," Zelmanowitz has said.

No one is certain just how much loot the Mob has stolen from the securities market. By the early Seventies, known thefts were running to more than $45,000,000 annually; but the judgment of the experts is that this is a fraction of the total. A confidential report by investigators to Senator John McClellan and his committee estimates that there may be more than 25 billion dollars in stolen and counterfeit securities floating around the country and the world today; in public testimony, the amount was estimated at 50 billion dollars. That amount would have the potential to shake the financial stability of more than a few countries.

• • •

The new brains in the Syndicate are, as shown by the invasion of the securities market, experts in the use of the most vital of modern business tools, the computer. One area of computer readouts that has been studied with great diligence is demography. The American middle class continues to shift West and South, from cities to suburbs, settling more and more in areas combining residence with leisure activities such as golf, boating, tennis and other recreation.

Where the population has flowed, the Mob has been right alongside, and often in front, paving the way. Tipped off by hirelings on the public payrolls, the Mob has often bought land early and cheaply and then either developed it itself or sold it to other developers at vastly inflated prices. It was Mob money, usually well concealed, that bought the land and financed the hotels along the Miami Beach Gold Coast and in Las Vegas, that financed the welter of condo-miniums that have sprung up in the Florida Everglades, the deserts of the Southwest, in Palm Springs and all across Southern California. It was the Mob, anticipating the future long before most Americans, that went on a land-buying spree in Valdez, Alaska. As it happens, that land at the water's edge is the site where the terminal of the Trans-Alaska pipeline will eventually be built.

On the face of it, much Mob investment seems legitimate. But soon zoning regulations are changed through bribes, scarce materials become available at cut prices, cheap and often nonunion labor is put to work. Even when the results are up to standard, the profit advantage far exceeds anything legitimate contractors can expect to make. And the underworld, if it so desires, can get away with shoddy workmanship that paid-off inspectors will pass and that buyers won't notice until long after they've moved in.

Big deals in real estate and building, of course, take a lot of money up front, and that is one thing the Syndicate does not lack. It has almost unlimited funds, from its own clandestine accounts and from the accounts of its old and traditional labor-union partners, especially the Teamsters. It was Teamster money guided by the Syndicate that financed Miami Beach hotels and Las Vegas casinos, condominiums in the Everglades and Palm Springs and numerous shopping centers and industrial parks in the Southwest. The money to purchase the swank Savannah Inn and Country Club in Savannah, Georgia, and the $6,000,000 that went into its improvement came from the 1.4-billion-dollar Teamsters Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund, a fund into which Teamster members were feeding $14 a week. Once the Teamsters had control of the club, the man chosen to administer it was Louis Rosanova. He was listed by Senate investigators as one of the top Chicago mobsters and has been indicted for mail fraud. For a time, he ran the Riverwoods Country Club outside Chicago, which he turned into the Midwest's favorite golf course for gangsters. Under Rosanova's direction, then, both Riverwoods and the Savannah Inn became favorite Mob resorts, which may not be exactly what reputable pension-fund advisors would consider safe places to invest retirement and welfare funds.

But then, gangster haunts have long been pet investments for the Teamsters. The union's pension fund has plowed more than $40,000,000 into Southern California real estate, and among its choicer stakes has been Dalitz' La Costa. According to Federal investigators, La Costa has become the major rest-and-recuperation center for top mobsters from all across the country, the center for major meetings and the stopping-off place for hoods on the run. Others, too, have enjoyed the comfort and privacy of La Costa, including high officials in the Nixon Administration, who gathered there during the planning stages of the 1972 Presidential campaign.

Ralph Salerno, a former New York City detective and Mob specialist, once said, "Organized crime will put a man in the White House someday and he won't even know it until they hand him the bill." That time may not yet have arrived, but the alliance between the Syndicate and the Teamsters also involves some ties to the Oval Office. Whatever their record, the Teamsters are still the nation's largest and perhaps most powerful labor union. With their passionate hatred of the Kennedys, who toppled Teamster presidents Dave Beck and Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster bosses were the natural font of labor support for Richard Nixon. Nor has Nixon been chary about cultivating that support.

By the middle of 1971, aside from some of the hard-hat construction workers, Nixon had no firmer friends in the union movement than the Teamsters and their new president, Frank Fitzsimmons. That June, Nixon turned up at a Teamster-executive-board meeting at the Playboy Plaza in Miami Beach, sat down next to Fitzsimmons and then, behind closed doors, wooed and was wooed by the labor leaders. Afterward, Nixon enthused, "My door is always open to President Fitzsimmons and that is the way it should be." Fitzsimmons was just as enthusiastic about his new friend.

Just how wide open Nixon's door was, and the price he paid for Teamster support, became increasingly apparent.

Hoffa was justly grateful: "I would say President Nixon is the best-qualified man at the present time for the Presidency of the United States." Fitzsimmons and other Teamster officials shared Hoffa's view. Indeed, so enthusiastic was Fitzsimmons that when all the other labor-union members of the President's Pay Board quit in protest against the Administration's anti-inflation economic policies, Fitzsimmons alone remained. During the campaign, he served as a vice-chairman of Democrats for Nixon, threw the union's support solidly behind the President--the first time the Teamsters had ever backed a Republican Presidential candidate--and told all Teamster leaders to contribute generously to that campaign. There are estimates that more than $250,000 was raised this way.

As Nixon's second term began, there was no sign that the love affair had cooled off. The Justice Department decided not to prosecute Fitzsimmons' son Richard, a Detroit Teamster official, on charges growing out of alleged illegal use of a union credit card. Said one Federal attorney, "I wouldn't blame the press or the public for being skeptical about why the Justice Department decided not to prosecute."

Nixon and Fitzsimmons remained in frequent communication. In February 1973, the Teamster boss was in the West, ostensibly to play a little golf in the Bob Hope Desert Classic. When the tournament ended, he drove to El Toro Marine Air Station to meet the President, who had been vacationing at San Clemente. The two men boarded Air Force One for a flight back to Washington.

Watching Fitzsimmons and Nixon that morning, a California investigator shook his head in dismay. "I can stand crooks," he said, "but it bothers the hell out of me when a guy meets with mobsters and then with the President." For in the days prior to the flight, in addition to playing golf, Fitzsimmons had attended a number of interesting meetings. At the Mission Hills Country Club and the Ambassador Hotel in Palm Springs, and then at La Costa, he had been joined in long and secret conversation by a host of California mobsters, including Sam Sciortino, Peter Milano, Joe Lamandri and Lloyd Pitzer, and a crew from Chicago that included Accardo, Marshall Caifano, Charles Greller and Lou Rosanova. At Fitzsimmons' side during all these meetings was Allen M. Dorfman, the union's pension-fund advisor, himself then under indictment for obtaining a $55,000 kickback on a pension-fund loan to a North Carolina textile manufacturer (for which he was later convicted and sentenced to a year in prison).

According to informants, the main subject of discussion at Palm Springs and La Costa was Teamster health, dental and legal plans under which union members would be provided services by specialists, with the pension fund picking up the tab. The participation of Syndicate leaders in those meetings made Federal investigators suspect that another pension-fund raid was in progress, and wire taps and informers began to confirm this. Just how it would be accomplished was simple. The specialists given contracts to service union members would pay a ten percent "commission," or kickback. According to a Federal informant, the details of that kickback arrangement were discussed at length and a plan was approved to funnel the payments through a Mob-controlled Los Angeles firm called People's Industrial Consultants.

As the role of that company became clear, court-ordered wire taps were placed on its phones. Then the investigation came to a sudden halt. The Justice Department rejected a request to continue the wire taps after the court-approved 40-day period had expired. According to reports, that request was denied after then-acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray III wrote a memo saying that the information emerging was potentially damaging and certainly embarrassing to the Teamsters and Fitzsimmons.

"The whole thing of the Teamsters and the Mob and the White House," said one FBI agent involved in the investigation, "is one of the scariest things I've ever seen. It has demoralized the bureau. We don't know what to expect out of the Justice Department."

• • •

Organized crime has traveled a long way from the sleazy beginnings in the ghettos and back alleys of the nation's cities a century ago. It may be stronger today and more pernicious than ever, its influence reaching into every corner of the country and beyond its borders.

Wars against the Syndicate, mounted regularly and with increasing vigor, have had only partial success. In recent years, they may have helped decimate the top command, but then, much of that command was aging anyway and would soon depart. Some of the campaigns have paid dividends. The Mob, for instance, has backed away from narcotics, though that racket is being taken over by newer and newly organized minority gangs.

Far less successful has been the drive on the major sources of Syndicate wealth--gambling and loan-sharking. It is no easy task to persuade most people that the dollar or two bet with a neighborhood bookie or policy operator, the chips tossed across the casino table, the dimes and quarters dropped into the slot machines or even the usurious interest charged by Shylocks mount up to billions that flow into the Syndicate coffers--and that this cash provides the leverage for infiltrating industries, and that such take-overs are inevitably followed by higher prices for goods and services. Even such efforts to circumvent the underworld as legal off-track horse betting and state-operated lotteries (as New York's Governor Malcolm Wilson proposed in January 1974), or legal policy games, can have only limited success. The Mob still gives credit, after all, and still operates on every block; and it is not easy to persuade people to stop doing business at the old stand with the old faces, especially since those old faces don't keep records of winners for the Internal Revenue Service.

It is no longer enough to say, as the experts have for so long, that organized crime will continue to grow and prosper until the people are informed, aroused and demand its elimination. The people are, or certainly should be by now, informed. Despite all that information, and except in sporadic and isolated instances, there are few indications that the people are aroused. Maybe it's just a deep sense of frustration and the inability to see where or how to launch an attack that will end in victory. The underworld, that distorted mirror image of the corporate overworld, has become so complex, sophisticated and vast, stretching across the whole of society, that to many it seems impossible to do anything but chip away at the edges.

Perhaps the one necessary ingredient in any successful campaign against the underworld is the existence of a moral climate that will no longer tolerate corruption. But the moral tone of a society is set by its leaders, in politics, business and labor. The corporate society today is ruled by men like those at I.T.&T. or the oil companies who see nothing wrong in fomenting revolutions against foreign governments of which they disapprove, who think it good business to buy and sell politicians like used stock cars. The union movement, too, has as leaders men like Hoffa and Fitzsimmons, dedicated to increasing their own power at any cost to the country and their followers.

And then there's the political establishment. The brunt of the battle against organized crime must necessarily be borne by the armies of the Justice Department and the FBI. From the heady and euphoric days of Robert Kennedy's rule, when ambitious young idealists were striking out, often recklessly and prematurely but with a moral certainty in their cause, there has been a steady erosion of integrity to the point where, today, the climate for the success of the Syndicate has unquestionably improved. The forces of law and order have been demoralized and enfeebled by the scandals surrounding John Mitchell and Pat Gray, by the slaughter of Elliot Richardson and Archibald Cox.

At the White House itself, the moral climate has been epitomized by Watergate and the wheelings and dealings, the manipulations and deceptions, the arrogance and amorality of the Ehrlichmans, Haldemans, Colsons, Deans, Liddys and Hunts. And of the Vice-President, Spiro T. Agnew, forced from office and branded a felon for payoffs and boodling that were so blatant they might have shamed even a Boss Tweed or a Jimmy Hines.

And the President himself. Someone once said that above all else, the one thing a President has to offer the nation is moral leadership. But the moral leadership and the moral tone set by Richard Nixon have been such that he found himself compelled to tell his nation, "I am not a crook."

This is the 12th and last in a series of articles on organized crime in the United States. The series will be published in October as a Playboy Press book, "Playboy's Illustrated History of Organized Crime."