(Amazon affiliate links throughout this piece.)

Pagano, a childhood immigrant to the U.S., was a product of the Sicilian Mafia tradition, maintained contact with various relatives within the criminal society and adhered to its values of loyalty and strict secrecy. Hayde establishes Pagano’s extensive connections to early U.S. mafiosi. He notes her family link to Pellegrino Scaglia, who, after stops in New York and St. Louis, became the Prohibition Era boss of Pueblo, Colorado, and was murdered there by rivals. Pagano’s relatives and family friends included Kansas City-area mafiosi with familiar names like Chiapetta, Accomondo, Colletti, Campo, Civella... She was said to have counted among her personal friends such figures as Frank “Three Fingers” Coppola, Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone and Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano

A number of those who were close to Pagano became allies of Hoffa, as he rose to leadership within the Teamsters union. None were as close to Hoffa as the union boss’s aide, protector and surrogate son Chuckie O’Brien, product of Sylvia Pagano’s marriage to Missouri hoodlum and Charles Binaggio employee Charles Linton O’Brien. By the time that her husband was found dead, apparently a suicide victim, Sylvia Pagano and her son Chuckie O’Brien had relocated to Detroit and were practically Hoffa family members.

The irony for Hoffa was that the underworld connections that contributed so greatly to his power and influence also resulted in his fall from his elected union position and in his demise. And Chuckie O’Brien, the union leader’s surrogate son, is widely regarded as the prime suspect in Hoffa’s July 1975 disappearance.

Readers of Hoffa’s Connection may be left with the feeling that Pagano’s personal importance to the Hoffa story is a bit overstated. Hoffa and the Mafia leaders of his era surely understood the benefits of secret cooperation and probably required no intermediary to bring it about. But readers are sure to be impressed by the many Pagano-related threads that tie the union leader to Mafia bosses.

The author is generous with the references used in his work, providing more than eighteen pages of source citations. Unfortunately, he decided against providing an index for the book (a complaint that I have voiced about his other excellent books).

Frank Hayde has specialized in Kansas City underworld history. He is also author of The Mafia and the Machine: The Story of the Kansas City Mob (2008) and Mafia Dreams: A True Crime Saga of Young Men at the End of an Era in Kansas City (2023).

Tackling myths related to 1928 Cleveland gathering

Another recently released book that may be of interest to Mafia historians is Cleveland Mafia Summit: Seized at the Statler by Don Billie. I haven’t personally seen a copy of this one yet, so I cannot vouch for its content. But I am aware that the author did considerable research on the subject of the December 1928 Cleveland Mafia convention. That convention was interrupted and documented by a local police raid. The preview for Cleveland Mafia Summit promises that the book will debunk myths long associated with the gathering and establish the factual details of the event.

Author Don Billie has specialized in subjects related to the history of Cleveland. In 2024, he released the book, Margaret Hamilton: From Cleveland, Ohio to the Land of Oz.

Recall that Marchesi was among the suspects arrested after the October 1890 assassination of New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy. Marchesi, his fourteen-year-old son Asperi and seven other men stood trial in March 1891 for the murder. Both Marchesis and four of their codefendants – including David’s great-great-grandfather Matranga – were acquitted by a jury. The jury could not reach a verdict on the remaining three defendants. The next day, an execution squad broke into Orleans Parish Prison and murdered eleven inmates, including Antonio Marchesi and five other men who had been tried but not convicted in the Hennessy murder case. Matranga, believed to be boss of a Mafia faction in the city, was untouched and went on to have a long and lucrative career as principal in a powerful stevedore firm.

But most of that occurred well after the incident involving Marchesi and the money. So, let me get back to that.

Following the October 15, 1890, shooting of Hennessy, police arrested Pietro Monastero, whose cobbler shop was across the street from the location where the mortally wounded police chief fell. Police found little evidence that Monastero ever did much in the way of shoe repair, but they discovered a roll of cash that totaled more than $850. Monastero offered no explanation for the money.

Police then went in search of those known to be friendly with Monastero. In the early morning hours of October 16, they found Antonio Marchesi and his son, both known to be frequent visitors to Monastero, setting up a fruit stand at the Poydras Market. The Marchesis insisted they knew nothing of the shooting of the police chief. Police found that Antonio Marchesi had in his pocket a $100 bill (equivalent to nearly $4,000 today). He failed to explain how he acquired it. The source of the money has remained a mystery.

David offered one possible explanation:

While it’s anecdotal and circumstantial, the family lore is ... Charles Matranga had a fondness for handing out $100 bills as gifts. ...This included bills under each plate at large meals and bills as gifts to children. Indeed, before he died, my father used to tell a story about being a toddler, visiting what was his great grandfather, and being handed a $100 bill. As they say, that was a lot of money back then.

That also works as an explanation of Matranga’s nickname, “Millionaire Charlie.” Rather than being based on any high-living by the underworld leader and stevedore, it may have been a commentary on Matranga’s generosity.

David noted that he visited the Metairie Cemetery to the northwest of New Orleans several years ago. He pointed out that the Matranga family tomb “is mere steps away” from a monument honoring Hennessy. David shared some photos, shown below.

Click here to return to Part IV.

The former followers of Joseph Noe reportedly worked closely with Dutch Schultz for a time. Eventually, they pulled away from Schultz. Following a surprising reconciliation with Noe’s suspected killer, Jack “Legs” Diamond, the group – led by brothers Peter and Vincent Coll and by Edward “Fats McCarthy” Popke – became violent enemies of the Dutch Schultz-Ciro Terranova combination, causing havoc in the rackets and spilling blood on the streets during the Bronx Beer War.

The precise moments that these shifts occurred remain uncertain. They can be broadly bracketed in time. They surely occurred no earlier than the close of 1928 and no later than the first months of 1931. Valachi suggested that spring of 1931, on the later side of that bracketed period, was the point of no return for the Coll-Schultz relationship. However, looking back from the moment of Vincent Coll’s 1932 murder, the New York Times placed the final Coll-Schultz breakup much earlier, in January of 1930. A period of tension may have preceded that.1

The Times did not offer a detailed defense of its selection. But it chose a very interesting moment:

• Just one month before that time, in December 1929, a testimonial dinner for City Magistrate Albert H. Vitale at the Roman Gardens restaurant in the Bronx was brazenly held up by seven gunmen. The incident exposed connections between the Tammany Hall Democratic machine and the Schultz-Terranova partnership. Some leading underworld figures of East Harlem and the Bronx attended the event. New York Mafia leaders appeared to be involved in having much of the loot quickly returned to the dinner guests.2

• Just one month after the moment specified by the Times, in February 1930, Bronx-based Mafia boss Gaetano Reina, whose organization had been an annoyance to the Schultz-Terranova organization, was shot to death. The killing was one of the triggers for the Mafia’s 1930-31 Castellammarese War. Some attributed the killing of Reina to “a cut-rate war among wholesale ice dealers.” In that scenario, Reina’s ice racket rival is generally thought to be Mafia boss of bosses Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria. While ice racket friction may have been a factor, as boss of bosses – the supreme arbiter of Mafia territorial disputes – Masseria was in position to resolve such a matter in his own favor. So, it seems the killing was caused by some more weighty issue. If Reina’s crime family had been found to be in any way supportive of the Coll group’s efforts against Schultz-Terranova, a profitable wing of Masseria’s organization, Reina could have been sentenced by Joe the Boss to an underworld death penalty. (I have always found it interesting that Reina was murdered during a visit to his mistress at the same Bronx apartment complex where Dutch Schultz’s close aide Abraham “Bo” Weinberg lived.)3

• Also in February, a gangster named Carmine Borrelli (sometimes written “Borelli” or “Barelli”) and his girlfriend were murdered by four gunmen at 170th Street and Inwood Avenue in the Mount Eden neighborhood of the West Bronx. Once friendly with Vincent Coll, Borrelli reportedly remained loyal to Schultz after Coll went his own way. Coll was charged with the double-murder in March 1930, but there was no evidence to convict him. Some theorize that Coll believed Borrelli was providing information to the other side about Coll gang movements.4

Jacapraro settles down, gangland doesn’t

On June 29, 1929, John Jacapraro married Rose Parlapiano in a ceremony at Our Lady of Pity Church, 276 East 151st Street near Morris Avenue in the Bronx. Rose, daughter of Nicholas and Mary D’Uva Parlapiano, was twenty-two and a resident of 307 East 154th Street (a short walk from the church) as she became a bride. Jacapraro was twenty-one and claimed to work as a clerk. He gave his home address as 1646 Williamsbridge Road. That address was just south of Van Nest Avenue in the East Bronx.6

Jacapraro’s selection of best man may be a strong indicator of his personal loyalties. Michael Basile, who had been arrested with Jacapraro, Coll and others at the Bronx speakeasy in December 1928 and was suspected of involvement in the Yonkers bank truck robbery, stood beside Jacapraro at the ceremony.7

John and Rose Jacapraro moved into an apartment at 1056 Sherman Avenue in the West Bronx. The address was a few blocks east of the Grand Concourse and about a half mile northeast of the old Yankee Stadium. For the 1930 U.S. Census, John Jacapraro reported working not as a clerk but as a private chauffeur.8

At roughly the same time, Jacapraro’s parents and siblings moved. Apartment renters since father Guerino Jacapraro first arrived in the U.S. in 1893, the Jacapraros suddenly became homeowners near the end of the 1920s, moving into 1646 Williamsbridge Road in the Bronx. (That family home was used as John Jacapraro’s home address in his 1929 marriage document and in reports of his 1931 murder.) For the 1930 Census, Guerino, then sixty-one, continued to report that he worked as a piano maker.9

The census valued their new home at $15,000 – in the same ballpark as the per-man average of $13,062 stolen by the Yonkers bank truck robbers. But the family’s financial turnaround may have been due in large part to the fact that several of the Jacapraro children in the household had reached working age. One was a telephone operator, another was a laborer in construction, and a third was a dressmaker. The census also shows that half of the home was rented out to another family, earning the Jacapraros $85 a month.10

John and Rose Jacapraro may have hoped for a long and happy life together. Gangland conflict prevented that. Soon after their marriage, people connected to the regional underworld began turning up dead.

Just after midnight, Wednesday, August 28, 1929, a patrol officer found a murdered man behind the wheel of a still-running car at 107th Street and First Avenue in East Harlem. The victim had been struck twice in the head by gunshots apparently fired through the vehicle’s rear window. Police identified the victim as Fiore Chicone, known by the alias of “Joseph Furey” (and known to Joseph Valachi as “Joe Fiore”). The press reported that Chicone had once been a private detective and then launched a new business as a protection racketeer, contracting with Little Italy merchants who paid him weekly fees. Police theorized that Chicone had entered into a dangerous competition with an area gang involved in the same line of work.11

The Chicone killing seemed unrelated to the Bronx Beer War, but there may have been a link. Police strongly suspected that the responsible party was Dominick “the Gap” Petrelli, a member of the Reina Mafia organization and a friend of what Valachi called the “Irish Mob” in the East Harlem area. Petrelli was arrested (Valachi recalled a severe police beating he and Petrelli received at that time) and charged with the murder in September, but he was soon released for lack of evidence.12

The Bronx peanut merchant known both as Thomas Russo and as James Batto was found murdered in an abandoned automobile left in front of 2 East 107th Street near Fifth Avenue in East Harlem. He had been one of the gang arrested at the Bronx speakeasy and suspected in the Yonkers robbery in December 1928. His body, doubled up on the floor of the green sedan, was first noticed by a group of boys playing ball on the street on Wednesday, September 11, 1929.

Russo/Batto had been fatally shot in the body, head and neck. Police concluded that he was killed somewhere else and then driven to the site where he was found. The newspapers noted that his peanut vending business had been a cover for his involvement in slot machines in New York and New Jersey. Fingerprints revealed that he had an arrest record dating back to 1904, when he was placed in the Catholic Protectory – a combination orphanage and reformatory – for a year and a half. His record since 1910, showed he had been arrested seven times and discharged each time.13

Read and interact with MobHistory’s short-form content in Substack Notes.

The Bronx Beer War appeared to heat up as the Mafia concluded its Castellammarese War in spring 1931. “Joe the Boss” Masseria was assassinated on April 15, 1931, and was replaced as crime family leader by Salvatore “Charlie Luciano” Lucania. With the support of many underworld factions, including the former Reina organization, Salvatore Maranzano became the new Mafia boss of bosses. This must have been an encouraging development for anti-Schultz-Terranova forces in the Bronx and East Harlem.

There appeared to be a rapid exchange of murders between the Schultz and Coll sides at the end of May and the start of June in 1931:

• Coll gangsters attempting to kill Terranova lieutenant Joey Rao on Thursday, May 28, fatally shot Frank “Big Dick” Amato of East Harlem and Dominick “Louis Slats” Bologna of the Bronx. Rao got away. Joseph Valachi recalled that this double-homicide occurred shortly after a Coll gangster tried to enlist his support in the war against Schultz-Terranova.14

• Early Saturday morning, May 30, Peter Coll was shot in the back while driving on Harlem’s St. Nicholas Avenue near 111th Street. Peter died a short time later at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital. Press reports noted that Coll had been an associate of Dutch Schultz. (Combining that with the earlier attack against Terranova men, city authorities insisted that the Bronx Beer War was between Schultz and Terranova.)15

• Genaro Ataroli (the surname was also spelled “Iadaroli,” “Iadarola” and “Atarali”), known around the Bronx as “Chin,” was put on the spot on Sunday, May 31. He stopped in at the Hub Bowling Alley, in the basement of 354 East 149th Street, expecting to receive a telephone call there. Several strangers entered the place and, when they identified Ataroli, they opened fire. Ataroli died of hemorrhage from a gunshot wound to the pelvis. Several other men in the alley were wounded. Ataroli, said to be a small-time gambler and protection racketeer, is generally linked to the Coll organization.16

• A Bronx watchman found Louis DeRosa (or “DeRose”) dead on the sidewalk in front of 211 Rider Avenue near 138th Street in the Bronx on Wednesday morning, June 3. DeRosa, described by police and press as a Schultz henchman, had been shot repeatedly in the head and body – all shots entering from the back. The “savagery” of the killing caused historian Patrick Downey to wonder “if Coll and his cohorts didn’t hold a special grudge against DeRosa.”17

Jacapraro and family

John Jacapraro was found murdered in an automobile left on Stratford Avenue in the Bronx just five days later, June 8, 1931. As noted in Part I of this series, Jacapraro was identified as a member of the Schultz organization. The basis for that identification remains uncertain.

Jacapraro’s arrest history (the speakeasy raid and the Yonkers robbery investigation) and his personal history (his selection of close Coll ally Michael Basile as his best man) suggests that he may have been much closer to the Coll side in the Bronx Beer War.

Delap and Gold found additional reason to believe that Jacapraro was part of the Coll gang. The coauthors of the Mad Dog Coll biography (Amazon affiliate link) summarized a portion of an article written by Edward J. Doherty of the Daily Mirror newspaper. It said that, following the death of John Jacapraro, Vincent Coll visited Jacapraro’s wife, gave her money to pay her debts and had her taken up to Acra, New York, to live in a house near the home of Jack “Legs” Diamond.18

Very close to the time that her husband was murdered and then laid to rest in St. Raymond’s Cemetery, Rose Jacapraro learned that she was expecting. With the Parlapiano and Jacapraro families living close by in the Bronx, it seems unlikely that she would have chosen that moment to move to Acra. Joan Marie “Jackie” Jacapraro was born to Rose in New York City on January 17, 1932.

Given Joan’s birth date of January 17, 1932, Rose Jacapraro probably would not have had much reason to suspect she was pregnant until the middle to end of May. By early June, the moment of her husband’s murder, the symptoms of pregnancy should have been evident.

The child, who never knew her father, also lost her mother when she was just six years old. Rose Jacapraro went into New York Post-Graduate Hospital in Manhattan in June 1938 for surgery. Following the procedure, she suffered a collapsed lung (possibly due to general anesthesia) and developed pneumonia. Within a few days, on June 12, she died. Rose Parlapiano Jacapraro was buried at St. Raymond’s Cemetery on June 15.19

At the time of her death, she was said to be a resident of 963 Sherman Avenue in the Bronx. That was one block south of the apartment she and her husband were known to have occupied in 1930.20

Guerino Jacapraro succumbed to prostate cancer on September 18, 1939. Retired for several years by then, he was still a resident of the house at 1646 Williamsbridge Road. The U.S. Census of 1940 found his widow Josephine as owner of that home. Living with her were daughters Mary and Helen.21

The same 1940 census showed their Parlapiano in-laws residing at 967 Sherman Avenue, an apartment building that adjoined the building at Rose’s last address. Their household included Nicola Parlapiano, widowed mother of the late Rose Parlapiano Jacapraro, along with married daughter Florence and her husband, unmarried daughter Angelina and eight-year-old “Joan Jackaparo,” who had completed first grade.22

Michael Basile

John Jacapraro’s best man, Michael Basile continued to be a determined Schultz opponent and Coll partner. He remained so even after the Coll gang lost its important patrons, with the assassinations of Mafia boss of bosses Salvatore Maranzano in September 1931 and Jack “Legs” Diamond three months later.

It possibly was the new, united stand of the post-Maranzano Mafia against the independent-minded Coll that made his war against Schultz unsustainable. Valachi noted that Mafia boss Salvatore “Charlie Luciano” Lucania had no patience for Coll’s mischief. Even while Maranzano was still alive, Lucania threatened to have all Irish mobsters eliminated in order to deprive the Coll war machine of its backing. (See: “Did ‘Charlie Lucky’ threaten ‘Owney’?”)

By the start of 1932, it seemed Coll and his followers had nowhere left to hide.

In January of 1932, Basile and Vincent Coll were arrested together, along with Patsy Del Greco and Lottie Kreisberger, and questioned by police. The arrest reportedly came about after police intercepted a Coll message from a public telephone to the home of Coll underling Frank D’Onofrio at 1218 Commonwealth Avenue in the Bronx. The four were soon released.23

That incident should have warned Coll that his activities and locations were being closely monitored. But he seemed not to address the problem.

Early the next month, four gunmen stormed into an apartment at 1216 Commonwealth, next door to the D’Onofrio home. They found Coll gang members inside and somewhat indiscriminately opened fire. Coll adherents Patsy Del Greco and Fiorio Basile (brother of Michael) were killed. Also killed was Emily Tarreizello, whose connection with the gang was uncertain. Louis Basile (another Basile brother) was critically wounded. Joseph Parrone and Lena Vinciguerra were less seriously wounded.24

Coll reportedly had been in that apartment a day earlier and was fortunate not to have been present when the gunmen arrived. His luck ran out a week later, when he was shot to death while making another call from a pay telephone.25

With Coll gone and his gang decimated, Michael Basile and Edward “Fats McCarthy” Popke relocated upstate to the Albany area. On July 11, 1932, New York State Police and detectives from New York City swarmed an apartment at the Albany suburb of Colonie. Popke emerged from the apartment and fired on the officers. He was felled by a gunshot to the head. Another gangster, George Kelly, was wounded when he tried to escape from the building. Michael Basile and Popke’s wife exchanged fired with the police for a time and then surrendered.26

In January of 1933, Michael Basile was convicted in Albany County Court of attempted murder. He was sentenced to a minimum prison term of seventeen and a half years and a maximum of thirty-five years. (George Kelly, also convicted, received the same sentence.) He entered Clinton State Prison on January 4 and was soon referred to by the press as “the last living member of the Vincent (Mad Dog) Coll gang.” (Two other Coll gunmen, Dominic Odierno and Frank Giordano, had been convicted of the Beer War murder of Joseph Mullins. They were executed in the electric chair early in July, 1932.) Basile registered for the World War II draft while an inmate at Clinton. He seems to have served only the minimum sentence.27

He appears to have been back in the Bronx in time for the United States Census of 1950, which found him living with his Ziccardi in-laws on Gleason Avenue and working as a laborer in building construction. By then, Dutch Schultz was long gone, having been murdered by his former underworld allies in October of 1935, and the Bronx Beer War and its young victims were virtually forgotten. Basile died in the Bronx on February 2, 1965.28

John Jacapraro and the Bronx Beer War

• Part I. Casualty of ‘Bronx beer war’ is hardly remembered today

• Part II. Bronx-born Jacapraro fell in with Noe-Schultz gang

• Part III. Impact of ‘Bronx beer war’ was widely felt

• Part IV. Bronx gang arrested, linked to Yonkers holdup

• Part V. Jacapraro is slain as ‘Bronx beer war’ escalates (now open).

Click here to return to Part III.

The “bunch of good crooks,” believed to be eight shotgun-wielding bandits in all, escaped from the December 12, 1928, Yonkers bank truck robbery with $104,500 - an average of $13,062.50 per man. Their getaway car turned up just north of the Bronx, where, it was assumed, another getaway car had been placed. Some of those details became interesting when New York City police made a raid at a Bronx speakeasy the next day.1

Receiving a tip that the remnants of the Joseph Noe gang were arming and preparing a fresh strike at their enemies, detectives early Thursday morning, December 13, raided the former Noe headquarters at 543 Brook Avenue in the Bronx. The five-story building, which sat close to the intersection with busy East 149th Street, contained a number of residential apartments, an illegal tavern, a storage area and an upstairs two-room apartment used by the gang.2

The detectives saw gang members John Jacapraro, Michael Basile and Joseph Piteo standing at the bar inside the speakeasy and arrested them. Police went upstairs to the gang apartment, where they took James Rose into custody. They discovered a large safe in the apartment and had Rose open it. Inside it were handguns.

A vast quantity of ammunition - including an estimated 1,500 revolver rounds, hundreds of shotgun cartridges and a fully loaded magazine for a Thompson submachine gun - was found within the apartment’s rooms. According to some accounts, the police also found bulletproof vests. They did not find shotguns to go with the cartridges or a Tommy gun to match the magazine.3

During the raid, an automobile with three men in it, pulled up in front of the speakeasy and then quickly drove away west on 149th Street. Police gave chase and forced the car to the curb several blocks away at Courtlandt Avenue. The occupants, James Russo, Dominic Dorelli and Charles Wersberg, were taken into custody. Back at the speakeasy site, police found and arrested Vincent Coll. Coll reportedly had been approaching the gang headquarters when the raid occurred and ducked into a nearby doorway to hide. When he saw the car with gang members show up, he emerged to warn them away, leading to his capture.5

Charged with robbery, but not that robbery

To justify the arrests, police said the eight prisoners were suspects in a payroll holdup that occurred on October 22. On that date, Sidney Korn, twenty years old, walked to the Manufacturer’s Trust Company bank on Third Avenue in the Bronx, intending to make a $900 deposit for the Wilson & Company meat packing business. He was about ten feet from his destination, when three gunmen approached and ordered him to walk away toward their car. When he reached the car, the gunmen told him to get inside, and Korn resisted. There was a scuffle, and a single shot was fired. The three would-be robbers left Korn and the money, jumped into the car and sped off. Wounded in the right groin, Korn was rushed to Lincoln Hospital for treatment. (It is uncertain whether Korn, a resident of 774 East 171st Street in the West Bronx, was acquainted with the gunmen. They certainly seemed to know he was carrying a fair amount of cash and not merely going to the bank to make a withdrawal or apply for a loan.) Police must have known they had little chance of fitting a crime committed by three men to their more numerous prisoners, but they “technically held” the eight men on assault and robbery charges related to the Korn incident.6

The prisoners were identified as:

• Vincent Coll, twenty, a truckman, of 1759 Montgomery Avenue in the Bronx. Four years earlier, Coll was put on probation for auto theft and then was sentenced to the House of Refuge for illegal weapons possession. He was out on parole at the time of his arrest at the speakeasy and could be sent to prison as a parole violator if any found involved in any wrongdoing.

• Mike Basile, sometimes “Vasile,” listed as twenty-one but possibly just twenty, a butcher, of 306 East 150th Street in the Bronx. Basile was arrested for grand larceny in 1926 but not prosecuted.

• John Jacapraro, twenty-two, chauffeur, for whom two Bronx addresses - 291 East 150th Street and 948 Grant Avenue - were listed. His police record showed that he was acquitted of a felonious assault charge connected with a 1924 shooting. (See Part II.)

• Joseph Piteo, twenty-six, of 1331 Intervale Avenue in the Bronx. His record showed several convictions for grand larceny, the last earning him a six-year sentence at Sing Sing. Piteo was free on bail at that time for the attempted killing of Eddie Diamond in Denver. When questioned by police, Piteo admitted jumping bail. (See Part III.)

• James Rose, twenty-three, of 452 East 143rd Street in the Bronx. Rose was said to be the proprietor of the speakeasy that served as gang headquarters. His police record included arrests for intoxication.

• Charles Wersberg or Weisberg, thirty, of 1618 Selwyn Avenue in the Bronx. He had served a prison sentence in Sing Sing for a bank holdup in Corona, Queens. At the time of his arrest, he was out of prison on parole.

• Dominic Dorelli or Borelli, thirty-one, real estate broker, of 2131 First Avenue in East Harlem. He already had served three prison sentences - one for felonious assault and two for robbery.

• Thomas Russo, also known as James Batto, thirty, owner of peanut vending machines, of East 123rd Street in the Bronx.7

In their earliest reporting, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Brooklyn Daily Times also stated that the group included Richard Sullivan, thirty-two, bartender, of 729 Jackson Avenue in the Bronx. The Daily Times omitted Vincent Coll from its list, so still had a total of eight prisoners. The Daily Eagle, however, included Coll, for a total of nine prisoners, while stating “eight men seized” in its Page 2 headline. The bartender was not mentioned in later accounts.8

Authorities in Yonkers took an immediate interest in the report of the arrests of the eight Bronx gangsters with obviously missing shotguns. On the same day, Police Chief Edward Quirk told the press that he had been informed of the matter by NYPD Inspector John Duane.9

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On Saturday, December 15, the eight suspects were arraigned in Morrisania (Bronx) Court as robbery suspects and for violation of the Sullivan Law (New York State law restricting possession of firearms). They pleaded not guilty. Magistrate Bernard Douras ordered them held without bail for examination on Monday.11

The press began reporting that witnesses to the Yonkers robbery had viewed a lineup of the suspects. According to the reports, the witnesses, including wounded Yonkers Patrol Officer Patrick O’Keefe, identified one or two of the Coll gangsters as possibly being part of that holdup. Dominick Dorelli was mentioned specifically by newspapers, but police would not confirm the rumors.12

The number of suspects identified as the possible Yonkers bandits increased to as many as four of the eight at the start of the following week. The Yonkers Herald stated that Dominick Dorelli, Vincent Coll, Charles Wersberg and Thomas Russo were identified by holdup witnesses.13

The Sullivan Law charge focused on Jacapraro, Piteo and Rose, when the group was next brought into Morrisania Court. Magistrate George F. Ewald set bail at $50,000 each for Jacapraro and Rose. Piteo continued to be held without bail.

Holiday in Yonkers

On Wednesday, December 19, Magistrate Ewald agreed to discharge the eight prisoners into the custody of Yonkers police, and the Coll gangsters were brought to Yonkers for questioning related to the bank truck holdup.15

The next day, in Yonkers City Court, defense attorney Edward V. Broderick argued that his clients faced a “flimsy charge.” Broderick’s reasoning may have been a bit degrading to those clients: “That [Yonkers bank truck holdup] was a high-class job, done by experts, and these men are not of that type.” Broderick noted that the identifications were weak. “My clients say none of them were identified, and the police claim that they have only identified four at the most.”

Judge Charles Boote admitted his own concerns over the identifications: “There is serious doubt as to whether they are the ones.” But the judge decided to hold the group without bail to allow further investigation.16

The eight suspects were held through the Christmas holiday. On Wednesday morning, December 26, 1928, Judge Boote asked for an update from Police Chief Edward Quirk. The chief stated that four of the suspects had been inconclusively identified by witnesses as participants in the holdup. Those identifications were “too weak to base a complaint against them.” Quirk speculated that witness recollections may have been affected by fear of the suspects. Boote discharged the eight men for lack of evidence.

Only three were allowed to go free: Michael Basile, Dominick Dorelli and Thomas Russo. The rest were turned over to New York City detectives for transport to Bronx County Jail. John Jacapraro, Joseph Piteo and James Rose were set to be arraigned for violating the Sullivan Law. Vincent Coll and Charles Wersberg were to be returned to prison for parole violations. (It appears that parole violators were returned to the institutions from which they had been paroled. In Coll’s case, that was the Elmira Reformatory, which he entered when sixteen. A twenty-year-old gangster was a tough fit for a reformatory, so Coll’s return visit there is believed to have been a brief one.)17

At an arraignment in Morrisania Court on December 28, City Magistrate August W. Glatzmayer set bail for James Rose ($5,000) and John Jacapraro ($2,500). Both men were bailed out. Piteo, who faced a possible life sentence under the Baumes Law (New York State law requiring life imprisonment for habitual offenders) as a fourth-time offender, was held without bail.18

The charge against Rose was dismissed by Magistrate Ewald on January 5, 1929. The case against Piteo was referred to the grand jury. Jacapraro remained free, as his weapons charge was put on the docket of the Court of Special Sessions. It is not certain if he was ever tried on the charge.19

John Jacapraro and the Bronx Beer War

• Part I. Casualty of ‘Bronx beer war’ is hardly remembered today

• Part II. Bronx-born Jacapraro fell in with Noe-Schultz gang

• Part III. Impact of ‘Bronx beer war’ was widely felt

• Part IV. Bronx gang arrested, linked to Yonkers holdup (now open)

• Part V. Jacapraro is slain as ‘Bronx beer war’ escalates

Tagging of posts

The first (and quite possibly the least interesting) change involves a more careful use of post tags. Substack isn’t great in its handling of tags, and many of you probably aren’t even aware that they are used at all. But each tag assigned to a posted article functions as a web address. If you go to your web browser search bar and enter

https://mobhistory.substack.com

followed by a /t/ (that’s short for “tag,” I guess, though “tag” certainly seems short enough as it is) and then the name of the tag, you get a page of results related to that tag.

It’s a neat feature, if you know that it’s there and you know how to use it.

The challenges for me will be to use tags consistently, to apply tags that are recognizable and to regularly share with you the listing of accessible tags. (If you search for “jack-diamond,” for example, and all of the relevant posts are tagged “legs-diamond,” your search will be unproductive.) I’ll be going through existing posts in an effort to improve their tagging. And I’ll figure out some way to present you with a list of active tags. Hopefully, at some point, Substack will improve its handling of tags, and this will become an easier to use feature for you and for me.

Paid memberships

The idea of charging readers for access has always rubbed me the wrong way. I’m going to stop doing that. And I apologize for doing it at all.

I do appreciate very much the generous support that paid subscribers have shown for my work. And I will continue to welcome voluntary contributions through the Buy Me A Coffee links (for the record, I don’t actually drink coffee). But I don’t want to restrict information to only those willing and able to acquire paid subscriptions.

I have indefinitely suspended paid subscriptions to the MobHistory Substack. In official Substack terms, I have paused subscription billing. According to the site, when this is done, “new subscribers cannot pay and existing subscribers are not being charged.”

This does create a problem. There are some articles on the MobHistory Substack that can only be fully accessed with a paid subscription. If new subscribers cannot pay, they are closed out of those articles without any possible remedy. Except one.

Walls are coming down

I am removing the existing paywalls from articles on the site, starting with the earliest ones and moving forward. Unfortunately, there seems to be no current mechanism for selecting all articles and removing their paywalls all at once. So, this will take a little time. At this point, all articles from January, February and March of 2025 should be freely accessible to all visitors. And all visitors should also be able to comment on those articles if they wish.

I intend to remove the paywalls from articles as I work to improve their tags (discussed above). It shouldn’t take too long to get through all the articles.

Click here to return to Part II.

The individual who profits most from a gangland killing is generally regarded by history as the primary suspect. In the case of the October 16, 1928, fatal shooting of Joseph Noe, however, the usual motive is widely disregarded. The incident, which resulted in Noe’s November 21 death, certainly caused Dutch Schultz to graduate from junior partner to sole proprietor. Schultz, however, is thought to have been genuinely shocked and upset by the loss of Noe. (Perhaps he was slightly less upset than the other members of the gang, who had been protected by Noe from being under the command of the greedy and moody Schultz.) Suspicion generally falls on the declining gang of Jack “Legs” Diamond.

In fall 1928, the beer war had begun (possibly just A beer war had begun), but the combatants were not entirely clear. Shifting alliances through the months and years ahead further complicated the conflict (or conflicts).

The killing of Anthony “Tony Marlow” Melillo in Manhattan may have been an early chapter in the beer war story. Its motive and its impact remain uncertain. Melillo was shot five times on Friday night, October 5, 1928. The shooting occurred outside the Harding Hotel, Broadway and Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan, very close to the location where Joseph Noe was shot eleven days later. (Pat Downey reported that Jack Diamond was a resident of the Harding Hotel at that moment and was a suspect in the Melillo murder.) Melillo was greeting a neighbor, William White, when two gunmen stepped from the post-theater pedestrian crowd and opened fire. Melillo was struck in the back, shoulder, abdomen, arm and leg.

He was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where he refused to identify his assailants. “Never mind who they were,” he told police. “I’ll take care of them myself later.” Wounds to his lung and small intestine proved fatal. Melillo died of pneumonia and sepsis early Monday morning.2

Also possibly related to the conflict was the November 4, 1928, shooting of gangland financier Arnold Rothstein at the Park Central Hotel, Seventh Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street in Manhattan. With a severe gunshot wound to his lower abdomen, Rothstein lingered near death at Polyclinic Hospital until succumbing at ten-fifteen in the morning of November 6.3

One incident that is widely regarded as a response to the Noe shooting occurred about 1,800 miles away from New York City while Noe was still clinging to life.

Mile-high murder attempt

In poor health, Eddie Diamond, brother of Jack “Legs” Diamond, had relocated to Denver, Colorado. He was accompanied there by a bodyguard known as John Marino. The two men took rooms at 651 Madison Street in a residential section east of the downtown. In late October, Eddie Diamond leased the city Olympic Club building as a venue for boxing events. The site had been used for the purpose in the past, with disappointing results, but Eddie felt it would succeed after some redecorating and promotion of “high-class cards.”4

He hadn’t gotten very far in his new venture when he and Marino were attacked late Monday morning, November 5 – one day after Rothstein was shot and one day before Rothstein died. The two men were driving near their home on Madison Street, when gunmen opened fire on them from inside another vehicle. Diamond’s car was forced to the curb, and Diamond and Marino ran for safety. Diamond and Marino escaped injury, but the negative press resulting from the violence halted Eddie’s efforts at the Olympic Club.5

The attack against Diamond and Marino seemed to be solved by the Denver Police with the November 15 arrests of two men (a third suspect in the attack, Frank “Blubber” Devlin, was identified later). The two were apprehended after they ran from police detectives checking on newcomers to the area. The suspects were determined to be Joseph Piteo and Eugene Moran, both recent arrivals from Back East. Piteo, who tried to convince police he was “J.F. Francis” and then “James Joseph Nolan,” was referred to in press reports as the “Patent Leather Kid” for the patent leather shoes he wore. Authorities learned he was a professional thief wanted in New York for parole violation. Moran was said to be a habitual gum-chewer with a distinct Boston accent. A search of their rented room at the Dresden Apartments, 1115 Logan Street, turned up machine guns, a rifle, a silencer and two revolvers. Asked to explain the arsenal, Moran responded, “We were going hunting. I was just ready to take out a license.”6

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On November 26 (five days after the death of Bronx gang boss Joseph Noe), Piteo and Moran were released on bond of $5,000 each to appear for a December 17 court hearing on attempted murder charges. They did not wait around for trial - both men quickly traveled back to the New York area.7

Holdup in Yonkers

While it could not be linked with certainty to the Noe gang or to its conflicts, an incident in Yonkers, New York, raised some questions.

Wednesday morning, December 12, 1928, a bank messenger car was loaded with cash at the Yonkers post office building at Main Street and Buena Vista Avenue. The money, intended for the payroll of the Alexander Smith and Son’s Carpet Company factory, was to be taken on a very short trip – no more than a few city blocks – to the First National Bank on South Broadway near the downtown Getty Square intersection. The messenger car was an enclosed, light truck, holding driver Richard Higgins and assistant Adolph Kautter in the front seat and Police Officer Patrick O’Keefe, armed with a revolver, in the rear.

The vehicle pulled away from the post office at about ten minutes after nine. Rather than deal with the rush-hour traffic on Main Street, the messenger car traveled one block south on Buena Vista and turned east on Hudson Street. Bandits were waiting. (How the bandits knew they should wait on Hudson is uncertain. Main Street seems to have been a more direct route to the bank. Perhaps Hudson was a route commonly taken by the bank messenger car. Or, possibly, some arrangement was made with an occupant or occupants of the car. A good deal of preparation appears to have gone into the robbery.)

As the car entered Hudson Street, a previously parked Buick sedan darted out in front of it and a Cadillac pulled alongside. Gunmen wielding shotguns jumped out of both vehicles. Seven men approached the messenger car, while an eighth man waited at the wheel of the Cadillac.9

Shots were fired, vehicle windows were smashed and a fair-sized hole was shot through the back of the car. All three in the vehicle suffered non-life-threatening wounds. Officer O’Keefe later reported that the gunmen penetrated the messenger car and forced him to the floor so quickly that he didn’t have time to draw his revolver.

The bandits obtained four bags containing a total of $104,500. They all then climbed into the Cadillac and drove away, south on Clinton Street toward the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The entire robbery took only a few minutes. The first calls to police headquarters were reportedly received at nine-fifteen.10

Police checked out the Buick sedan left at the scene of the robbery. It had been reported stolen from Samuel Gershowitz, a resident of the Bronx. The Cadillac was found abandoned at Forest and Jerome avenues, near the Bronx line. It was assumed that the robbers earlier had placed a getaway car in that location. The Cadillac had been reported stolen from James Thalen of North Bergen, New Jersey. The license plates of the two cars involved in the crime had been switched.11

Witnesses told police that the robbers were all young men, between about twenty-five and thirty. Some wore caps, others wore soft hats. All were well-dressed. Police Chief Edward J. Quirk told the press, “It was a bunch of good crooks. They took a chance and made it.”12

The loot from the Yonkers robbery was significant. (The $104,500 total would be roughly equivalent to $2 million today.) If there were eight men involved in the crime, the average gain for each of the “good crooks” was about $13,062, at a time when the average cost of a single-family home in New York City (outside of Manhattan) was less than $6,000.13

John Jacapraro and the Bronx Beer War

• Part I. Casualty of ‘Bronx beer war’ is hardly remembered today

• Part II. Bronx-born Jacapraro fell in with Noe-Schultz gang

• Part III. Impact of ‘Bronx beer war’ was widely felt (now open)

• Part IV. Bronx gang arrested, linked to Yonkers holdup

• Part V. Jacapraro is slain as ‘Bronx beer war’ escalates

Click here to return to Part I.

John Jacapraro was born September 29, 1907, at 291 East 150th Street in the Melrose neighborhood in the southwestern portion of the Bronx. (The area is now regarded as part of the “South Bronx,” but it probably was too far north to be considered that at the time.) On his birth certificate, his name was spelled “Govanno Guerino Jacaprare,” and his parents were listed as Guerino and Giuseppe Andonella [Antonelli] Jacaprare. Though the certificate stated that he had two siblings, he was at least the fourth child and at least the second son born to the couple.1

Guerino Jacapraro was originally from the Naples region of Italy. He was born there in October of 1869 (probably with a surname spelled “Iacapraro”). He relocated to New York City when he was twenty-three (the same age at which his son was murdered). Guerino was a craftsman, who made pianos for a living.2

It appears that, once he was well settled in his new home, he sent word to Italy that he was ready to marry. Giuseppa (Josephine or “Josie”) Antonelli, a twenty-two-year-old native of Pietrabbondante, then traveled from Naples to New York, arriving at her destination on July 1, 1896. She was accompanied on the transatlantic trip by a young member of the Jacapraro family (likely a little brother of Guerino), Alfredo, age eleven. Just ten days later, she and Guerino were married in a Manhattan civil ceremony and began their life together at 547 East 149th Street near the southeastern corner of the Bronx’s Melrose neighborhood.3

The Jacapraro family lived with Guerino’s brother at 586 Morris Avenue at the time of the 1900 Census. That address was near Melrose’s southwestern corner, about a half mile west of the family’s first home. Soon after that, the growing number of Jacapraros moved back to their original stamping grounds, taking an apartment at 527 East 150th Street. In 1907, the year that Guerino was naturalized, they bounced the half-mile back toward Morris Avenue again, taking an apartment at 291 East 150th Street, between Courtlandt and Morris avenues, and settling in there. That apartment is known to have been the family home from the time of John Jacapraro’s 1907 birth until the end of the 1920s.4

Aside from his longtime home address of 291 East 150th Street, little is known about John Jacapraro’s early life. But the address alone may help give us a feel for what his childhood was like.

The Bronx of that period was experiencing tremendous growth, triggered in large part by the early 1900s expansion of New York City subway rail lines into the borough. While John Jacapraro was growing up, the area around his apartment was becoming increasingly congested, as Jewish, Irish and Italian immigrant families spilled out of Manhattan and made their homes in the southwestern sections of the borough. Politically, the borough was controlled by the Manhattan-based Tammany Hall Democratic political machine.5

The area around the Jacapraros’ home was by no means an exclusively residential section. The apartment building was just to the east of the extensive “Mott Haven” rail yards (sometimes called the “Melrose yards”) of the New York Central Railroad. The yards took up much of a large wedge of land between Park Avenue/Morris Avenue and Spencer Place/Sheridan Avenue from East 144th Street all the way up to East 161st Street.

A little further west of the apartment was the lower end of the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. A few more blocks to the northwest was Yankee Stadium, which opened in April 1923 (after a massive construction effort), when John was fifteen years old. The area had easy access to Manhattan by rail or via the Third Avenue Bridge, less than a mile to the south.6

In the midst of all that, there was a growing Italian-American community (”Little Ponza”) in the area, and many residents were parishioners of Our Lady of Pity Roman Catholic Church on East 151st Street near Morris Avenue, a block north of the Jacapraro apartment. The Jacapraro children may have attended Our Lady of Pity schools. (Our Lady of Pity was closed in the 1990s and later was torn down. The older Church of the Immaculate Conception, built to serve a German-American population, still sits a short distance to the east on East 150th Street.)7

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The New York State Census of 1925 shows the Jacapraro family - including Guerino, Giuseppa, six of their children and a teenage nephew – living at 291 East 150th Street. John, not yet eighteen (but listed as eighteen), was said to be working as a piano maker like his father.8

By then, John Jacapraro had already had some trouble with the law. One year earlier, he had been arrested in connection with a shooting. He reportedly was charged with felonious assault but later acquitted.9

That old gang of mine

John Jacapraro became a part of a gang organized by Joseph Noe, in support of his illegal beer-running activities. Noe was only about a decade older than Jacapraro, but he may have been a sort of role model for Jacapraro and other young gangsters. From the likely point of view of a teenage Jacapraro, Noe must have led a considerably more exciting life than his father, Guerino, the piano maker.10

Noe had learned about plumbing from his own father, Charles, and early in life found applications for that knowledge in the dispensing of beer. At the start of the Prohibition Era, Joseph Noe was a resident of 396 154th Street in the Melrose section of the Bronx, a few blocks from the Jacapraro home. Officially, he was employed at the rail yards, but he very quickly found ways to put his beer background to highly profitable use.11

As he became a speakeasy proprietor and regional beer-runner, Noe appears to have counted among his employees a young Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer. With an illicit business reliant on collectors, enforcers, drivers,..., Noe required young men gifted with toughness and unburdened by any scruples beyond personal loyalty.

Schultz was a neighborhood kid from his early teen years, residing with his mother and sister at 875 Brook Avenue in Melrose. Born in 1901 and abandoned by his father at a very young age, Schultz proved early on that he was not averse to criminal activity. Before reaching the age of twenty-one, he had been arrested for assault, grand larceny and unlawful entry, and he had served time in the reformatory.12

Eventually, as Noe’s organization grew in power from bases in the Bronx and New Jersey, the gang chief reportedly elevated Schultz to the position of junior partner. We do not know how the other members of Noe’s organization viewed this promotion. The group’s speakeasy headquarters at the time were within a ground-floor shop and upstairs apartments of the building at 543 Brook Avenue, about a half mile down the street from the Flegenheimer home.14

The quickly expanding Noe-Schultz operation absorbed Bronx territory previously held by the gang of Jack “Legs” Diamond and began intruding on areas of Manhattan, and this seems to have been the root cause of the early stages of the Bronx beer war. A turf dispute with Diamond is believed to have been the cause of the fatal shooting of Noe in a Manhattan gunfight on the morning of October 16, 1928. Louis Weinberg (whose real name was Benjamin Greenberg and who apparently also went by the name Jacob Kaufman), widely reported to be a Diamond lieutenant, also was apparently killed in the shootout. Weinberg/Greenberg was found in dead in a car left in a Manhattan garage.15

Noe lingered for more than a month after the shooting. He died at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan very early in the morning of November 21, 1928. He was just thirty-two. The official causes of his death were right lung “pneumo-pyo-thorax” (a collection of fluid and pus in the chest that collapsed the lung), “terminal pneumonia” and “gangrenous bedsore.” These resulted from the bullet wounds to Noe’s left back, spinal cord and right lung.16

Noe’s death was staggering for the young members of his criminal organization.

John Jacapraro and the Bronx Beer War

• Part I. Casualty of ‘Bronx beer war’ is hardly remembered today

• Part II. Bronx-born Jacapraro fell in with Noe-Schultz gang (now open)

• Part III. Impact of ‘Bronx beer war’ was widely felt

• Part IV. Bronx gang arrested, linked to Yonkers holdup

• Part V. Jacapraro is slain as ‘Bronx beer war’ escalates

The brief but eventful life of John Jacapraro ended in 1931.

That was an especially violent period for New York gangland. Quite a few noted outlaws passed from this life during the underworld conflicts of the late Prohibition Era. Jacapraro was not at all in the same league as Giuseppe Masseria, Salvatore Maranzano and Jack Diamond, who all were rubbed out in the same year. So, it’s understandable that few recall the young Bronx hoodlum. But there are interesting aspects to the story of his life and death, and those may lead to some challenging ideas.

John Jacapraro was, in fact, remembered for a while after his demise - that “while” being just over seven years.

In the late summer of 1938, when Tammany power James J. Hines was brought to trial for conspiring in rackets with Dutch Schultz (who, by the time of the trial, had been dead for almost three years), newspaper reports looked back on the so-called “Bronx Beer War.” And Jacapraro was mentioned, along with Louis DeRosa, who was killed a few days before him in June 1931. A widely distributed news service story about the Hines trial recalled that both Jacapraro and DeRosa had been “two of Schultz’s army” in that war:

They were only two of Schultz’s army that had gone to their reward before the Bronx beer war was six months old.1

The “Schultz’s army” comment in that news service piece may be accurate. I honestly don’t know. Personally, I am not sold that Jacapraro was a Schultz soldier. And I’m not at all sure how the sources from the 1930s were so sure about this detail – the papers apparently reported what the police said, and no one seems to have gone to the trouble to define the evidence that supported the conclusion.

But that had been the story from about the moment that Jacapraro was found dead on June 8, 1931.

Found on Stratford Avenue

A guy named Joseph Phillips was the one who did the finding. And it’s amazing that no one else took notice. Phillips lived at 1349 Stratford Avenue in the Bronx. That location was about two-thirds of a mile south of the Bronx Zoo and about a quarter mile east of the Bronx River. When he left for work at ten o’clock in the morning of June 8, he noticed a new Buick sedan parked at the curb. And he saw someone apparently resting in the back seat.3

It took about eight hours for Joseph Phillips to fully grasp what he saw. I’ll just let him tell you what happened:

I saw the car parked there, right in front of our apartment house. Children were playing around the car. I saw a man resting in the back but paid little attention until I came home at night. Then when I saw the car still there and the man still sitting there as though asleep, I got suspicious.4

It was after six o’clock that evening when Phillips again saw the man in the car – eight daylight hours after he was first spotted – and decided to check on him. Finding the man in a kneeling position in the back of the car and also very dead, Phillips called the police.

Detectives and Medical Examiner Karl S. Kennard soon arrived. They found five bullet wounds in the body but no bullet damage in the automobile, suggesting that the killing had been done somewhere else. The bullet wounds damaged the heart and lungs, triggering a fatal hemorrhage. Dr. Kennard figured that death had occurred about twelve hours earlier, around the time of sunrise.

The victim was identified as John Jacapraro, then a resident of 1646 Williamsbridge Road in the Bronx. (This home sat just south of Van Nest Avenue, about one and three-quarter miles northeast of where his body was found.) Jacapraro reportedly had a substantial arrest record.5

The next day, the New York Times reported that “Jacapraro was a lieutenant of Arthur (Dutch) Schultz, Bronx ‘beer baron.’” The paper attributed that information to “police,” but the specific source was not noted. Police had by then questioned Pete Donoghue, described as the foreman of Schultz’s garage and the “traffic manager for the Schultz fleet” of beer trucks. While it seems unlikely given the circumstances, possibly Donoghue provided some information about Jacapraro’s status in the Schultz organization.6

Though the authorities seemed uncertain how Jacapraro wound up being repeatedly shot and left in the Buick, reporter Theodore Prager of the New York Daily News pieced together a story:

One of Dutch Schultz’s Bronx beer boys, John Jacapraro, 24, was yanked from a truck and taken for a fatal but luxurious ride in a large blue sedan yesterday - the latest victim of the uptown brew war.7

Prager apparently came up with the “yanked from a truck” stuff because of the clothes Jacapraro was wearing when he was killed. Those consisted of a “grease-smudged blue jumper [a pullover top] and khaki trousers.” That, according to the press of the day, was the “uniform” worn by beer truck drivers.

The statement of Jacapraro’s age, though consistently reported by police and press as twenty-four, was a tad off. The young hoodlum’s twenty-fourth birthday was still months away.8

Police learned that the abandoned Buick had been stolen from Robert Massa of 25 Prospect Place in Brooklyn. The license plates on the vehicle were stolen from a different car, one belonging to Edgar P. Jackmon of 1406 Merriam Avenue in the Bronx.9 (Gangsters often switched the license plates on stolen vehicles, so their use of the cars would not be readily apparent to police.)

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Beer war misinformation

The authorities were clearly confused about the nature of the “beer war” they saw raging in the Bronx and Harlem at that time. The conflict was generally reported to be between the gang of Dutch Schultz and the gang of mafioso Ciro Terranova. One paper said, “This feud is reported to be between this [Schultz] gang and the men of Ciro Terranova, known as the ‘Artichoke King,’ according to police.”10

Unnamed police were again releasing information, and the same incorrect data found its way into other newspapers.

In its account of the Jacapraro murder, the News of Paterson, New Jersey, reported that the Bronx beer war was just two weeks old - perhaps dating it roughly to the May 28, 1931, East Harlem fatal shooting of Frank “Big Dick” Amato and Dominick “Louis Slats” Bologna (Within eleven days of those killings, Peter Coll, Gennaro “Chin” Iadoroli, Louis DeRosa and John Jacapraro had also been killed.) - and had started when “cut-rate brewers” invaded Schultz territory.11

Of course, we now know that Schultz and Terranova were allies at that time, and the fighting in this “beer war” was generally between the combined Schultz-Terranova forces and an independent group controlled by Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll. Schultz and Coll probably had been sniping at each other for some time, but Coll (encouraged and aided by Schultz enemy Jack “Legs” Diamond) apparently committed himself to an all-out war against the Dutchman and his friends around May of 1931. Joseph Valachi heard about that from a Coll emissary he knew by the name of “Lindy”:

...I remember that I was at 112 Street between First and Second Ave. and this kid called me on the side and told me that Vincent Coll and Fat McCarthy are going to fight against Dutch Schultz and they asked him to talk to me and the Gap [Dominick Petrelli], so I had heard something like that was in the air but I never dreamed that they will approach me on something like this... He explained that Vincent Coll asked for a raise because he and Fat McCarthy are doing all the work and they intend to wreck the brewery and they are going after Ciro and the Dutchman.12

The Coll group was apparently aware of the Mafia’s Castellammarese War, in which Valachi and Gap and their underworld associates fought against the Schultz-Terranova organization and its allies. Not realizing that the Castellammarese War was recently settled, the Coll gangsters hoped to combine forces with the anti-Schultz-anti-Terranova mafiosi. Valachi explained the postwar situation to Lindy and warned him that the Mafia in New York was united (at the moment) and could not consider supporting any action against Schultz and Terranova.13

Coll did find some mafiosi who were more receptive. Eventually, Valachi’s immediate superior – new Mafia boss of bosses Salvatore Maranzano – decided to team with Coll to eliminate mafiosi he found uncooperative. Maranzano reportedly hired Coll to assassinate Salvatore “Charlie Luciano” Lucania, a close ally of Schultz and Terranova. However, Lucania learned of the threat and struck first, having Maranzano killed in September 1931.14

John Jacapraro was not killed as the result of any conflict between Schultz and Terranova. If he was a victim of a gangland war, it was a very different sort of war.

John Jacapraro and the Bronx Beer War

• Part I. Casualty of ‘Bronx beer war’ is hardly remembered today (now open)

• Part II. Bronx-born Jacapraro fell in with Noe-Schultz gang

• Part III. Impact of ‘Bronx beer war’ was widely felt

• Part IV. Bronx gang arrested, linked to Yonkers holdup

• Part V. Jacapraro is slain as ‘Bronx beer war’ escalates

You likely recall that Dewey served as the “special prosecutor” when Lucania and eight codefendants were convicted on June 7, 1936, of organizing prostitution in New York City. Lucania, portrayed in court as the powerful leader of the vice syndicate, as well as a lifelong outlaw, was sentenced June 18 to a hefty prison term of thirty to fifty years. Early in January 1946 (less than ten years into that lengthy incarceration), then-Governor Thomas Dewey commuted the remainder of Lucania’s sentence. Citing, with a degree of skepticism, reports that the imprisoned Lucania had rendered assistance to the U.S. military during World War II, Dewey released Lucania on the condition that he be deported to his native Italy.

Many seemed to accept the idea that Lucania had provided some sort of valuable wartime help to the U.S. while inside prison and, so, deserved special consideration for that aid. But others felt that Dewey’s apparent about-face on the public danger posed by Lucania was evidence of corruption. Hadn’t Dewey previously sought to have Lucania put safely away for the longest possible time? Some claimed Dewey’s reversal was the result of a payoff. Some suggested it was brought about because Dewey was being blackmailed for his own personal indiscretions.

(Quotes attributed to Lucania at different times seemed to support both of those allegations. This can be interpreted as evidence supporting the payoff or blackmail theories or as evidence that the creation of Lucania quotes was a popular hobby.)

In the years that followed his deportation, law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic branded Lucania a kingpin in narcotics trafficking from the Mediterranean into the U.S. For some, this made America’s growing drug problem the direct result of Dewey’s alleged corruption.

Joesten basically accepted this argument (which seems incredibly naïve today): Dewey had brought about postwar narcotics trafficking from Europe into the U.S. by freeing Lucania. But the author, who later made a career of conspiracy theories related to the Kennedy Assassination, felt Dewey’s corruption was less blatant than bribery or personal blackmail. Joesten built his corruption case upon the (somewhat shaky) foundation of Joseph Victor Bendix.

It is extremely likely that Bendix would have been thoroughly forgotten by history (Do you recall who the guy was?) if not for his involvement in the 1936 trial that sent Lucania to prison. Though Joesten made much of the Bendix role as a state witness in the trial, it seems Bendix was not really a major factor in the trial outcome.

Joesten’s story

While awaiting his own trial on the jewelry theft charge, Bendix reportedly came to the attention of Dewey’s staff because he boasted to fellow prisoners held at the Tombs in Manhattan that he knew Lucania. Word got out to the special prosecutor’s office. The Dewey team was then working frantically to assemble a convincing compulsory prostitution case against the Mafia boss and received the news of a potential witness with enthusiasm.

When Bendix was put on the witness stand in the Lucania trial on May 21, 1936, he stated that he had known Lucania since about 1928. He testified that in 1935 he requested and was granted by Lucania a job as a collector for the vice operation. He would visit brothels and gather the regular payments of operations protected by the ring. He said Lucania cautioned him that the job didn’t pay much, but Bendix said he felt it was “better than going back to stealing,” especially with a Baumes Law life sentence hanging over his head. Bendix recalled that Lucania decided, “If you are willing to work for $40 a week, it is O.K. with me.”

The author said that Bendix delivered that testimony as the result of an arrangement with Dewey. Dewey promised, Joesten stated, that Bendix would not suffer a Baumes Law sentence, but, “allowing maybe for a few weeks or months of face-saving detention, he would again be a free man.” According to Joesten, Bendix met his obligations under the deal and Dewey conveniently forgot his own.

Joesten acknowledged that concerns about Bendix’s truthfulness quickly surfaced at the trial.

A pretrial letter Bendix intended to send to his wife was somehow misaddressed to Assistant District Attorney Morris H. Panger in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. That letter seemed to suggest that Bendix was cooking up a story that would win him some helpful government support. In it he asked his wife to visit with a lawyer on Special Prosecutor Dewey’s staff: “Try to think up some real clever story which would prove interesting to Mr. Ariola...”

Panger, himself, appeared as a witness in the Lucania trial on June 2. The assistant district attorney described the letter he received from Bendix and stated that Dewey had been made aware of its existence as well as its significance – Bendix clearly was seeking to ingratiate himself to prosecutors in order to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison – before the vice case had even started.

Despite the erosion of Bendix’s credibility, Joesten argued that Dewey’s successful prosecution of Lucania was the result of Bendix’s testimony more than any other factor:

“He [Bendix] was the first and the most important witness produced by Dewey to connect Luciano directly with the vice syndicate he was accused of operating.”

Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey won the conviction, Joesten stated, “on the strength of deliberately concocted, perjured testimony.”

From then on, Joesten wrote, Dewey lived in fear that the public would discover his use of fraudulent evidence in his most famous case. Dewey’s later political career – as a repeat Presidential candidate and as governor of New York – was built upon the reputation the case earned him as a virtuous crime fighter, Joesten argued.

Dewey’s 1943 commutation of Bendix’s sentence was a belated payment for perjury, according to Joesten. But Bendix was angry that he had been made to wait so long, the author said, and he began gathering information for an autobiography that would expose Dewey’s tactics. After some time, Bendix took the additional step, according to Joesten, of reaching out to Lucania attorney Moses Polakoff. Word then got to Dewey.

Joesten said that, in 1946, Governor Dewey arranged for the release and deportation of the still-powerful and dangerous Lucania simply because he feared that Lucania attorney Polakoff was preparing to expose Dewey’s deliberate use of Bendix’s false testimony. The release of Lucania satisfied the crime boss and his attorney and allowed Dewey to continue to cover up his earlier prosecutorial misconduct.

When the release of Lucania quickly became a political liability for Dewey, because of the widespread reports that Lucania was at the helm of international narcotics trafficking, the governor devised an acceptable rationale for his action, Joesten charged.

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The author claimed that Dewey latched firmly onto Lucania’s rumored contribution to the U.S. war effort and installed his pal William B. Herlands as New York Commissioner of Investigation in order to provide supportive documentation for the tale. Dewey diminished his own action in the Lucania matter, suggesting he merely agreed to the recommendation of a state pardon board, which had been convinced of Lucania’s remarkably selfless patriotism by U.S. military officials.

Having washed his hands of the Lucania release to the greatest degree plausible, Dewey then seized an opportunity to publicize the new cover story. Becoming aware of Joesten’s work on a Lucania biography, The Luciano Story, the governor used his influence to delay publisher David McKay Co.’s planned release and have the tale inserted into it. It was an extraordinary abuse of his public position, according to Joesten:

State governors do not, as a rule, double in brass as editors or literary critics. If Dewey didn’t like what was going to be published in THE LUCIANO STORY, he had a perfect right to speak out against it, to set the record straight, or to sue the authors and the publisher for libel. But the actual course he followed in bringing his influence to bear upon the publisher; putting one of his top aides to work – at state expense! – on “research” intended for the book; and finally filtering it into the work behind the back of the original author... cries out to high heaven that Bendix’ accusation is true!

Meeting Bendix

Joesten said he became fully aware of Dewey’s maneuvering only after The Luciano Story was released and after Joesten communicated his displeasure with the revised work to the press. That’s about when Joseph Bendix got in touch with him.

Joesten received numerous letters and telephone calls following his press release. One of the callers was Joseph Bendix. Another was George Hunter White, agent with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who had already criticized the book and its authors before learning of Joesten’s position. Both of those men wanted to get together with Joesten for discussions. Joesten, apparently a fan of the Bureau of Narcotics, met first with White, and they immediately hit it off. The author was more hesitant to meet with Bendix. He knew little about the man, and what he knew wasn’t good.

After delaying for a while, Joesten arranged with his new friend George White to meet with Bendix at a Midtown Manhattan apartment that White had secretly equipped with microphones and recording equipment. The meeting occurred on January 21, 1955, and, according to Joesten, the entire conversation was recorded.

Bendix described the process of becoming a witness for Dewey. He said he was initially approached by a fellow prisoner, Daniel Caputo, who had turned state’s evidence and was working with Dewey. Bendix, desperate for help in avoiding a lifetime in prison, agreed to consider becoming a state witness. Representatives of the special prosecutor met with Bendix “to brief him on the advantages he might gain if he could ‘remember’ that he knew Lucky quite well...” When Bendix committed to assisting the vice case prosecution, he was “thoroughly coached by Dewey’s staff” about his testimony. He was well rehearsed by the time of his court appearance. And Bendix told Joesten that he delivered testimony that was entirely fraudulent.

“[Bendix] told me so flatly,” recalled Joesten. “He had never come face to face with Lucky before they met in the courtroom.”

Bendix reportedly asserted that he was on the verge of being freed from prison on appeal, when Dewey commuted his sentence and he was released on parole. That left the career criminal at Dewey’s mercy, virtually guaranteeing that Bendix would not publicly discuss his troubling history with Dewey. Bendix summed up his position for Joesten: “I am trying to say that Mr. Dewey knew I had lied on the stand.”

Some problems with the Joesten story

Of course, anyone with any serious interest in the subject knew that Bendix had lied on the stand. And knew that Dewey knew that Bendix had lied on the stand. That much was established just days after his testimony, when Panger brought out that Bendix effectively had been auditioning for a role in the Dewey courtroom production. (Other defense witnesses also punched holes in the Bendix testimony and proved him unreliable, while additional prosecution witnesses provided damaging testimony against Lucania that took the place of Bendix’s discarded story.) It was in the newspapers. Lucania’s defense attorney focused on it in his case summation. It was a cause of embarrassment for Dewey and the office of the special prosecutor, and it threatened more than aided Dewey’s case against Lucania.

Dewey did not win Lucania’s conviction because of Bendix’s testimony; he won it despite Bendix’s testimony. (Other witnesses defined Lucania’s connection with the vice ring. And, due to Dewey’s questionable tactics, those witnesses appear to have been under enormous pressure to testify for the state. But Joesten neglected their stories.)

When Lucania attorney George Morton Levy delivered his summation, he spoke at length about Bendix’s obvious “cock and bull story” and about Dewey’s quick abandonment of his own false witness. Levy said he was sure that Dewey did not suborn perjury. Dewey didn’t need to instruct witnesses to lie, the defense attorney said, as Dewey “was dealing with a class of people only anxious to find out what lie they could tell.”

But the key aspect of the Bendix story, as presented by Joesten, was the assertion that Dewey knew that Bendix was going to lie on the stand before he did so. While there was some suggestion during the trial that Dewey had been in a position to have foreknowledge of the false testimony (from the strongly suggestive letter provided by the D.A.’s office, for example), and while Joesten accused that at least some members of Dewey’s staff had foreknowledge of the false testimony, evidence is lacking that Dewey intentionally put Bendix on the stand to have him lie about Lucania.

Joesten’s idea of the corrupt bargain between Dewey and Bendix remains a problem. Dewey was not then in a position to arrange for Bendix to go free for any reason. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had jurisdiction over the burglary charge against Bendix. And that matter had already been decided before the Lucania trial began. It is doubtful that Bendix’s May 1936 witness-stand performance, credible or not, could have affected it. Judge Charles Cooper Nott, Jr., had sentenced Bendix on April 23, 1936, to fifteen years to life in prison. Bendix was received at Sing Sing Prison to begin that sentence on April 27.

(The Bendix guilty plea to a fourth felony burglary charge may be seen as evidence that he believed he had some kind of deal in place. Such a plea legally required the stiffest prison sentence. Why would Bendix, who clearly wished to avoid prison, trigger such a result with a guilty plea. It generally made little sense for any Baumes Law defendant to plead guilty – no benefit was legally available for confession and no greater jeopardy was faced by contesting the charge. But odd things did occur in those situations. Recall the February 1929 case of Joseph Valachi’s brother, Anthony “Frank Rocco” Valachi. Anthony was caught taking what turned out to be virtually worthless items from a store and was charged for the fourth time with burglary. Rather than accept a plea deal on a lesser charge that would have earned him a few years in prison, he demanded an immediate hearing on the burglary charge. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.)

So, it is not clear what reward Bendix expected from Dewey in exchange for invented testimony or what promises might have been made by the prosecutor or his staff members. Dewey could have recommended executive clemency, though the weight of such a request by an ambitious Republican prosecutor on popular Democratic Governor Herbert H. Lehman is uncertain. (Did Bendix somehow foresee Dewey’s 1942 election as governor?) Dewey surely had little to no influence over Manhattan District Attorney William Copeland Dodge. The mere fact of Dewey’s existence was objectionable to that office. It had been suspicion directed against Dodge’s office that triggered Dewey’s appointment as special prosecutor in the first place.

(It is interesting that, in March 1942 – about six years after he was sentenced – Bendix attempted to change his plea in the burglary case to “not guilty.” The prisoner claimed that he had only pleaded guilty because he had been promised executive clemency, though the story was vague on the source of that promise. At that moment, the New York County District Attorney’s Office actually supported Bendix’s attempt to undo what he had done in 1936. Note: No such support had been evident while Thomas Dewey held the D.A. office between the start of 1938 and the end of 1941. Bendix’s legal counsel found a sympathetic judge in Jonah J. Goldstein of the General Sessions Court. However, State Commissioner of Correction John A. Lyons opposed the change of plea – probably because allowing incarcerated confessed criminals to decide that they were no longer guilty could create havoc in the penal system. Supreme Court Justice Ferdinand Pecora sided with Lyons, ruling that a defendant cannot change a plea after beginning to serve a sentence received on that plea. Justice Pecora prohibited Judge Goldstein from taking any role in the matter. Dewey was inaugurated as New York governor less than a year later. And he granted clemency to Bendix the following August.)

Finally, it seems we have little more than Joesten’s word in support of the Bendix story. It appears that Bendix allowed the matter to drop after he vented at Joesten. As is so often the case with alleged recordings of supposedly earthshaking statements, the Joesten tapes of Bendix’s statement vanished. Well…, Joesten reported that the recordings mostly vanished... for a while, at least. After the meeting with Bendix, Joesten obtained two reels of audiotape from George White. These reportedly contained his interview with Bendix. But, when Joesten later had an opportunity to listen to the reels, he found that one contained “only a small and relatively unimportant portion of my talk with Bendix” and the other contained jazz music.

Joesten claimed that George White deliberately retained the bulk of Bendix’s taped statement for his own use. The author said that both reels of tape eventually found their way, through White, to Senator Estes Kefauver. It is uncertain if the senator – a political adversary of Dewey – ever made use of the material. Joesten seemed satisfied: “...Senator Kefauver is just the right man to have all the elements of this fantastic story in his possession.”

Like much of Joesten’s later work, the Dewey conspiracy theory was a fantastic story. And like that other work, it probably also was strongly influenced by Joesten’s politics.

→ It has been many years since I first became aware of Joachim Joesten’s book, Dewey, Luciano, and I. I remember that I received an email from a website visitor, who had heard the book existed but knew nothing more about it. Some searching of archives produced an April 25, 1957, letter from Joachim Joesten to the editor of the Berkshire Eagle newspaper in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The letter mentioned The Luciano Story, then a couple of years old, and it went on to discuss Dewey, Luciano, And I:

…if you want to dig a little deeper into one of the most intriguing and best-guarded secrets of New York politics, take an even better look at my mimeographed 102-pp, exposé, “Dewey, Luciano and I” (Great Barrington, Mass., 1955). There, you will find the whole, unvarnished story of how Thomas E. Dewey first framed Lucky Luciano, and then was blackmailed into releasing him, which is, in a nutshell, all of the “mystery” New York State has been investigating for years.

Joesten indicated that mimeographed copies of the book were available through the New York Public Library in Manhattan and the New York State Library in Albany. “A copy may be also obtained from the author at the address below,” he added. (The address was simply “Hartsville,” referring to a village just outside Great Barrington, Massachusetts.)

There was no mention of how many copies had been produced. When I sought to take a look at the book, I contacted the New York Public Library, the New York State Archives and the Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Libraries. One copy turned up in the NYPL main branch on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. (The WorldCat library catalog reports no other copies known.)

The title page of the work specifies that it is a “limited, mimeographed pre-edition.” And it carries a pricing notice: “Price: $100 a copy (one hundred dollars).” (Seems a little steep for a hundred-page booklet.) ←

Sources

• Much of the material in this article was drawn from Joesten, Joachim, Dewey, Luciano, and I, Great Barrington MA: 1955. Thank you to Talia Nudell, librarian, General Research Division, New York Public Library; Janice Carapellucci, Feet on the Ground New York City Genealogy Research; and Donna Brown, assistant director of operations, Great Barrington MA Libraries, for assistance in acquiring a copy of this work.

• “4th offender gets life stealing empty boxes,” New York Herald Tribune, April 20, 1929, p. 2

• “5 sentences commuted,” Rochester NY Times-Union, Aug. 17, 1943, p. 3.

• “Bargain wages blamed for vice,” Buffalo Evening News, May 22, 1936, p. 15.

• Chas. Luciano, Sing Sing Prison Receiving Blotter, inmate no. 92168, received June 18, 1936.

• Conboy, Martin, Brief on Behalf of Defendant-Appellant, Charles Luciano, The People of the State of New York against Charles Luciano, et al., Record on Appeal, Volume III, Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division - First Department, 1937.

• “Court forbids judge to hear plea change,” New York Times, March 4, 1942.

• Dewey, Thomas E., Twenty Against the Underworld, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1974.

• “Dewey commutes Luciano sentence,” New York Times, Jan. 4, 1946, p. 25.

• “Dewey paroles Luciano for deporting to Italy,” New York Daily News, Jan. 4, 1946.

• “Gets life after $1 theft,” New York Times, April 20, 1929, p. 25.

• “Guard Luciano ‘squealers’ in reprisal fear,” New York Daily News, Aug. 19, 1936, Bklyn. Sec. p. 2.

• Herlands, William B., Report of Investigation, State of New York Office of Investigation, Sept. 17, 1954, Thomas E. Dewey Papers, University of Rochester.

• Joseph Bendix, 121-20-6909, Social Security Death Index, death Oct. 1974.

• Joseph Bendix, inmate no. 65699, Sing Sing Prison Receiving Blotter, received March 1, 1915.

• Joseph Bendix, inmate no. 75999, Sing Sing Prison Receiving Blotter, received June 2, 1924.

• Joseph Bendix, inmate no. 91906, Sing Sing Prison Receiving Blotter, received April 27, 1936.

• Joseph V. Bendix and Adele Dragiles Certificate and Record of Marriage, Kings County, certificate no. 69, Dec. 27, 1929.

• Joseph V. Bendix, New York City Extracted Marriage Index, certificate no. 67, Kings County, Dec. 27, 1928.

• Joseph Victor Bendix, World War I Draft Registration Card, Sept. 12, 1918.

• “Lucania sentenced to 30 to 50 years; court warns ring,” New York Times, June 19, 1936, p. 1.

• “’Lucky’ Luciano to be paroled and deported,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Jan. 3, 1946, p. 1.

• Max Goldstein and Jennie Bendix Certificate of Marriage, Borough of Manhattan, certificate no. 23656, Nov. 24, 1904.

• Names of Convicts Discharged from Auburn Prison during the Month of March 1917.

• New York State Census of 1905, New York County, Assembly District 21, Election District 12.

• Poulsen, Ellen, The Case Against Lucky Luciano: New York’s Most Sensational Vice Trial, Little Neck, NY: Clinton Cook Publishing, 2007.

• Powell, Hickman, Ninety Times Guilty, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939.

• “Sing Sing isolates Lucania squealers,” Brooklyn Times Union, Aug. 18, 1936, p. 20.

• “Six in state prisons released under parole,” Binghamton NY Press, Aug. 17, 1943, p. 11.

• “State cop on stand for Lucky,” New York Daily News, June 3, 1936, p. 6.

• Symontowne, Russ, “Assistant D.A. helps Luciano fight vice rap,” New York Daily News, June 3, 1936, p. 3.

• Symontowne, Russ, “Vice defense paints Dewey as ‘glorifier,’” New York Daily News, June 6, 1936, p. 3.

• Transcript, The People of the State of New York against Charles Luciano, et al., Record on Appeal, Volume III, Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division - First Department, 1937.

• United States Census of 1910, New York State, Kings County, Ward 30, Enumeration District 1412.

• United States Census of 1940, New York State, Westchester County, Ossining, Sing Sing Prison, Enumeration District 60-256.

• United States Census of 1950, New York State, Kings County, Enumeration District 24-1257.

• Valachi, Joseph, The Real Thing: Second Government - The Expose and Inside Doings of Cosa Nostra, unpublished manuscript, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, 1964, p. 171-172.

Frederic Milton Thrasher conducted the study in the early Prohibition Era for his 1925 sociology doctoral dissertation focused on youth gangs. After some tinkering, that dissertation was published in 1927 by the University of Chicago Press under the title, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago. The book included a number of photographs, diagrams and tables of data. One detailed illustration - a map entitled Chicago’s Gangland - was printed separately, folded and stored in a pocket attached within the back cover of the book.1

Thrasher’s extraordinary efforts to understand and explain the formation, nature and activities of city gangs were never forgotten. In fact, the Illinois-based National Gang Crime Research Center has presented an annual award for excellence in gang research that is named for him (the Frederic Milton Thrasher Award). His work received some additional attention just a few years ago, as The Gang entered the public domain with the expiration of its copyright.2

Among other things, Thrasher noted the effect of the city’s various environments on the formation of youth gangs, which were his primary focus. He found that gangs sprang up spontaneously within the conditions found in Chicago’s “slum” neighborhoods – low-cost housing, congested conditions, poor infrastructure, filth and deterioration, recent immigrant population, encroaching business and industrial uses, ... – and were particularly common in “frontier” areas where one particular racial or ethnic enclave bordered another. To Thrasher, these areas represented the cracks in the social structure of the city.

In his Chicago’s Gangland map, Thrasher showed the boundaries he calculated for the ethnic and racial neighborhoods in the city, as well as industrial property uses and more park-like settings. Over all of that, Thrasher plotted the locations of gangs with established clubrooms (red triangles) and gangs without clubrooms (red circles). While Thrasher seems not to have been especially fond of using specific names in his research, he did include some gang names on his map. (For example, the locations of the club rooms of the rival Chinese-American gangs, On Leong Tong and Hip Sing Tong, are noted.)

Though organized crime was not the focus of his work, Thrasher’s book contained some discussions of the antecedents of Chicago’s Outfit. He hesitated to use the proper names of gangs and gangsters, but some exceptions were made. The author was more specific when referencing locations:

The North Side jungles of gangland lie north of the Loop and the Chicago River, and east of the north branch of that stream, constituting a portion of the unique area known as the “Grand Canyon of Chicago” because of the great diversity of its “social scenery.” ... Along the lake front northward is the “Gold Coast,” representing the extreme of wealth and fashion, while in the southern portion we find “Bohemia,” the North Side artists’ colony. West of these two areas is a cosmopolitan and rooming-house district which includes the haunts of a gang of dope-peddlers serving North Side addicts; the north stem of “Hobohemia”; and “Bughouse Square,” a center for hobo intellectuals. This region serves also as a base for such notorious bootlegging groups as the Clark and Erie gangs. Formerly it was the bailiwick of Chicago’s most notorious gangster, the leader of the powerful ZZZ gang of “hijackers” and rum-runners, who was assassinated by unknown enemies.

The gangs are most numerous, however, between this region and the north branch of the river, in “Little Sicily,” a community of southern Italians. Certain immigrant customs color the gang life of the region. The vendetta is often carried into the quarrels of juvenile gangs, while the Mafia of southern Italy takes the form among criminal groups of secret gangs of the Black Hand, such as the “Gloriannas” and “Little Italy” gang. So notorious are these gang conditions that the southern portion of the colony has sometimes been called “Little Hell.” In this area is “Death Corner,” the scene of frequent murders.4

Thrasher wrote about “The Black Hand,” which he saw as an American adaptation of Mediterranean traditions, such as Mafia and Camorra. Through the targeting of well-to-do immigrant Italian and Sicilian families in blackmail schemes, he felt, Black Hand “has had a paralyzing effect upon the development of Italian life.”5 Thrasher noted that the problem was not limited to Chicago:

Before 1905, in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Pennsylvania, Ohio, wherever Italians were congregated, systematic blackmail and murder produced a feeling of insecurity and terror unfavorable to all constructive activity.6

He viewed Chicago’s Black Hand as particularly problematic and as closely related to traditional Italian criminal societies, though he did not accept the public perception of a monolithic Black Hand syndicate:

...there are many indications that numerous secret Black Hand gangs ply their trade in Chicago. Twelve murders were attributed to Chicago Black Hand groups for the first six months of 1925. One informant who has long lived in “Little Sicily’’ declares that there have been three hundred Black Hand murders here in the past forty-five years. To speak about the Black Hand is bad form among the Italians, but the educated Italian slyly winks when he tells the investigator that there is no Camorra in Chicago.7

According to Thrasher, the gangs of adult criminals in Chicago developed from the youth gangs. He argued that an adult gang represented “a development and perpetuation of the younger gang or at least of the habits and attitudes of individuals trained in younger groups.” And he suggested that adult gang crime was best understood by examining its roots in youth gangs.8

Organized crime groups, he found, were unexpectedly fluid in their leadership and their alliances. Alliances between and even within groups could be arranged quickly and could fall apart just as quickly. Changes in leadership occurred “easily; sometimes with more or less violence, but without much disturbance to the usual activities of the gangs.” While the assassination of a gang boss appeared to be a momentous event, Thrasher said, “The passing of an O’Bannian [O’Banion] simply transfers the crown to a new head or creates an opportunity for a new gang.”9

Within organized crime gangs, Thrasher noted a formal division of labor among specialized individuals and groups:

At the top are the professional criminals, who might be called, to use a business term, criminal enterprisers (or entrepreneurs). They provide the organizing energy and business brains of crime ... Fences or syndicates of fences must be employed to dispose of stolen goods or securities; doctors and sometimes even hospitals must be relied upon to furnish medical assistance to criminals without giving information to the police; fixers and political manipulators must be depended upon to use their influence with the law; professional or obligated bondsmen must be found to provide bail; shrewd criminal lawyers must be engaged to handle criminal interests in the courts... – all these together constitute, to borrow another commercial phrase, the “functional middlemen” of the underworld.

Besides these more specialized factors, the criminal enterpriser uses many other elements in the criminal community. There are habitual criminals who can be depended upon for definite assistance or parts in special jobs. Then there are numerous bums, toughs, ex-convicts, and floaters who frequent underworld areas and who are willing to make casual alliances for the commission of crime. Besides these there is a semi-criminal class of hangers-on and abettors who are more or less continuously employed at legitimate work, but who engage in questionable practices for side money.10

Thrasher said that local political bosses often entered into mutually beneficial alliances with boys gangs and organized crime groups. Gang support was useful to the politicians, who provided immunity in exchange for favors.

Referring to a quote from the Chicago Daily News, Thrasher explained, “Political alliances with members of gang have become so common in recent years that there has been a disposition to regard gangsters as ‘inlaws’ rather than as ‘outlaws.’”11

For these videos, historian-host James Gladwish interviewed prolific Mafia historian Scott M. Deitche.

Many of us first became aware of Scott back in the early 2000s, when he did groundbreaking work on the bygone criminal organizations of his adopted home region, the Tampa Bay area of Florida. This work came to our notice through Cigar City Mafia: A Complete History of the Tampa Underworld (Barricade, 2004). [Note: Book title links in this article are Amazon affiliate links.] Deitche followed up just a few years later with the more focused, The Silent Don: The Criminal Underworld of Santo Trafficante Jr. (Barricade, 2007).

Some readers may remember that Informer published a short interview with Scott back in its January 2009 issue.

More recently, Scott turned his attention toward the racketeering past of the land of his birth, New Jersey. And he quickly became a highly regarded expert on the subject. His book, Garden State Gangland: The Rise of the Mob in New Jersey (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) was generally well received. Scott’s latest work, Jersey Boss: The Rise of Mafia Power Jerry Catena is scheduled for release tomorrow (May 28, 2026).

In the OC Shortz videos, Deitche and Gladwish discuss the overlapping New Jersey interests of the powerful New York and Philadelphia crime families, as well as the state’s home-grown Mafia organizations. The second, quick video focuses on the disappearance of one of those native New Jersey crime families. Here are links to the programs:

• “Not shown in The Sopranos - The Truth about New Jersey Mafia”

• “New Jersey Mafia family vanished! Mysterious disappearance of a Mafia crime family.”

The fact that Lucania sat for interviews in Italy with coauthor Joachim Joesten during the spring of 1953 was certainly used as a selling point for the book. But the Joesten-Lucania conversations were hardly earth-shaking and probably disappointing to many who plunked down $3.75 for the 1955 hardcover in the hope it would reveal an “inside scoop.”

The conversations were generally confined within the book’s last chapter, entitled “Lucky talks,” consuming pages 303 to 327. Even when gathered into this single chapter out of the total of fourteen in the work, the Joesten-Lucania interviews seem flimsy, superficial and whiny. The coauthors apparently understood this, as material was drawn in from other Lucania interviews to add substance.

Taken for a ride

One portion of the Joesten-Lucania discussions was somewhat intriguing for its time (though the same information already had been published elsewhere), causing it to graduate from the book’s tail end all the way up to Page 71. It related to the brutal beating of Lucania back in October of 1929. (You’ll recall that a police officer found the badly cut and bruised Lucania walking along a road in Staten Island on October 17, 1929.)1

About the beating, Joesten asked Lucania, “Do you know who did it?”

“Sure - the cops,” Lucania answered. “They were just trying to find out things.”2

Apparently without the need for any other details, Feder and Joesten eagerly accepted this version of the beating. (Noting that “cops,” to Lucania, could have referred to any branch of law enforcement, from a local force on up to federal agents, they - probably more Feder than Joesten - surmised that federal narcotics agents had been responsible.):

The authors believe this explanation of Luciano’s famous ride is the only one that holds water. It is the only one that explains why he was able to come back alive.3

Other explanations, generally involving a kidnap and a poorly attempted murder of Lucania by his underworld rivals, had trouble explaining the survival of the victim. That problem must have been clear to Feder, who just a few years earlier had co-written (with former prosecutor Burton Turkus in the book, Murder, Inc.) one of the more colorful of the problematic tales:

Another mob boss wanted to learn the location of a batch of narcotics that Luciano had carefully put away. The rival hood had his strongarms pick Charley up and take him out to Staten Island... There, on a road that saw little of traffic, they hung Charley up by his fingers. They sliced him up somewhat. They used the handy plug-ugly’s trick of applying cigarettes to the soles of his feet, and here and there. The cigarettes were lit. Charley wouldn’t talk, even if it killed him - which it very nearly did. After a while, they left him hanging there, and departed...4

If you enjoy my work and wish to support it…

Lucky’s other comments

It seems that Joesten’s initial interview of Lucania was not too difficult to arrange. Ed Hill, executive editor of the Rome office of the Daily American, managed to secure for Joesten a letter of introduction to the manager of the Hotel Turistico in Naples, where Lucania spent a lot of his time. Joesten took a room at the hotel and used the letter to obtain an audience with the manager, a Signore Fantoccio. Fantoccio got word to Lucania that an American author wished to speak with him. Lucania showed up at the hotel the next day and called to Joesten from the lobby.9

During their conversation, Lucania complained about press coverage and promised, “Someday, I’m gonna write my own memories. Then the real story is gonna come out.”10 (Lucania’s hope to pen his own memoirs may have caused him to withhold details from Joesten.)

He suggested that unscrupulous movie producers were trying to convince him to finance a movie about his life. “They want me to foot all the expenses! They figure it’ll be about $300,000.” (In an earlier conversation with Lucania, columnist Leonard Lyons recommended that Lucania enter the movie business and discussed figures in that same range to finance a movie project. That may have been where Lucania picked up the number.) Lucania said he would not put up a nickel for a movie about his life and had legitimate offers that would pay him for participating in a movie project.11

Lucania claimed that the hounding of law enforcement made it difficult to engage in any legitimate business enterprise:

Let’s say I’m a partner in a cannery, for instance... Like if the cannery does business in the United States. If they know Lucky’s in it, they probably open every single can we ship, to look for dope.

The former New York crime boss told Joesten that people, claiming to be his “cousins,” were constantly looking to him for handouts. “In this country, everybody who got money, got a lotta cousins.”12

Joesten asked him how he managed his early release from New York prison, and Lucania spoke of his legendary assistance to the Office of Naval Intelligence while held at Great Meadow Prison: “I got my pardon because of the service I rendered the United States.” But he then acknowledged another possibility: “I guess they also realized that fifty years was too much for a crime like that.”13

(Joesten interpreted this as a Lucania admission that he had committed the crime, but the comment can be understood merely as Lucania’s acknowledgement that he was convicted of the crime.14)

Lucania grumbled that he was being persecuted by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics and its proxies.

Hitler was an angel in comparison to what Esslinger [Lucania apparently enjoyed mispronouncing the surname of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger] is. For six years, I have no peace at all. It is a nonstop persecution. I don’t know what Esslinger wants from me. No charge against me about dope will ever stand up. If there was evidence - just an inch of proof - I’d be in jail in less than an hour.15

FBN persecution was the result of politics, according to Lucania. “It’s about time to stop rapping me for all the bad things that happen in the United States and Europe,” he told Joesten. “They even blamed an illegal Venezuela diamond racket on me!”16

In addition to his arranged interview with Lucania, Joesten happened to run into Lucania at Giacomo’s restaurant in Naples one day and was invited to join Lucania. During the meal, Lucania commented on his appetite for spaghetti: “I really go for it - never get tired of it.”

Lucania also spoke about his desire to keep his home address secret, a problem for him, as the Italian police insisted on having his current address in a registry. As far as Joesten was aware, the only writer allowed access to the residence was Llewellyn Miller, who became familiar with Lucania and his significant other, former showgirl Igea Lissoni.17

Joesten did learn the address and attempted a drop-in. He spoke with Lissoni, who told him Lucania was not at home.18

Other interviews mentioned

The Luciano Story also presented quotes from about a half dozen other early 1950s occasions in which Lucania crossed paths with members of the press. These included a September 1951 interview for the Milano Sera newspaper, an indignant news conference at Naples in that same period, a curt “No pictures” comment punctuated with a couple of punches of cameramen following extensive police questioning, an observation on the Italian legal system while in custody for an eight-day period, an interview by Llewellyn Miller for a December 1952 article in American Weekly Magazine and an interview by Leonard Lyons for a lengthy article that appeared in the April 1953 issue of Esquire Magazine.19

Milano Sera quoted Lucania as stating that Frank Costello (whose appearance before the Kefauver Committee six months earlier was shown on television) “once shined my shoes, and was glad to do it.” Lucania told Joesten that the quote was invented.20

The Miller interview provided an intimate look at Lucania’s home life. The reporter visited the apartment overlooking the Bay of Naples, which was shared by Lucania and Lissoni.21

The Luciano Story used Lyons’ interview to point out that Lucania preferred the methods used by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to those used by Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger. “A guy does somethin’, Hoover grabs him... He don’t shoot his mouth off...,” Lucania said. “This Esslinger. Yakity-yakity-yak...” Anslinger’s unsupported accusations, according to Lucania, persuaded Italian authorities to take away Lucania’s passport and restrict his movements.22

‘Operation Underworld’

Another selling feature of The Luciano Story was probably the fairly detailed account Sid Feder added to the book (over the objections of coauthor Joachim Joesten) relating to Lucania’s alleged contribution to the U.S. military effort during World War II. This tale, cited as justification for the early release of Lucania from his compulsory prostitution prison sentence, was presented in Chapter 9, entitled “Lucky and Operation Underworld.”

According to Feder, a “killer pack” of German “U-boat” submarines terrorized the U.S. coast off New England, New York and New Jersey and “roved in our very harbors” during the early stages of the war. The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) was reportedly greatly concerned by this enemy activity and by the prospect that the U-boats might be receiving supplies and support from Nazi sympathizers within the U.S. fishing fleet. After “the specter of sabotage” arose with a devastating and suspicious (but later explained) ship fire in New York harbor, ONI decided that it needed access to the crime-dominated unions working in the fishing industry. Lieutenant Commander Charles Haffenden of ONI decided that the fishing boat crews and seafood market workers were under the control of the Mafia, and he led the effort to win the cooperation first of market power Joseph “Socks” Lanza and then of his gangland boss, the imprisoned Lucania.

Early conversations included Lucania’s attorney Moses Polakoff and longtime Lucania underworld ally Meyer Lansky. Reportedly to facilitate direct ONI communication with Lucania (though it certainly facilitated other types of communication, as well), the prisoner was transferred from remote Clinton State Prison at Dannemora to Great Meadow State Prison at Comstock, New York, not far from Albany. (For more on this period, see “Mob boss ‘Luciano’ in the hands of the law.”)

At the Navy’s request, special arrangements were made for Lucania to have unmonitored and largely undocumented visits. Through the course of this “operation,” Lucania and Lanza agreed to cooperate and apparently instructed other leaders in the fishing fleet and on the docks to cooperate with military intelligence officials. As the operation continued, according to Feder, it grew to include Joseph “Adonis” Doto, Frank Costello, Willie “Moore” Moretti, Vincent Mangano and others.23

In a moment of reflection, Feder noted, “There will be no attempt here to evaluate the work done by Lucky and his hoods. Only Navy Intelligence knows how valuable it really was - and N.I. isn’t talking...”

But Feder followed that up by noting that no incidents of sabotage occurred on the U.S. Atlantic coast during the war. This came across as a suggestion that “Operation Underworld” was successful, rather than as evidence that the problem the operation sought to resolve either did not exist or was already adequately addressed by other agencies.24

Later in the war, as the Allies contemplated invasions of North Africa and Sicily, ONI reportedly used Lucania underworld connections to help plan attacks. Feder stated that the Navy learned about Sicilian geographic features and municipal infrastructure. The underworld contacts also provided the identifications of antifascist Sicilian mafiosi who could be counted on to support the Allies, he claimed. Feder said the information provided by Lucania and his Mafia associates was “extremely valuable.” He was at a loss, however, to state specific examples.25

By the end of the war, all records of ONI’s “Operation Underworld” and its valuable information had vanished, Feder reported. At war’s end, Navy officials did vaguely inform the New York State Parole Board that Lucania provided assistance. That was sufficient to win Lucania a parole recommendation and a 1946 commutation from Governor Thomas Dewey.26

Later in the chapter, criticisms directed toward Dewey’s commutation of Lucania’s sentence were dealt with in strongly negative terms. Feder charged that U.S. narcotics officials had little knowledge of their own field and were inventing stories about Lucania. Feder described the investigations of the U.S. Senate’s Kefauver Committee as “antics” and labeled the committee itself as a “TV circus,” taking a position similar to that of Governor Dewey. (Governor Dewey of New York and Senator Carey Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, ambitious men of competing political parties, regularly sniped at each other. Dewey was a Republican Presidential candidate three times in the 1940s, winning the GOP nomination twice but losing in the general elections. Kefauver campaigned for President as a Democrat twice in the 1950s, becoming his party’s unsuccessful Vice Presidential nominee, behind Adlai Stevenson, in 1956.)27

Today, this chapter of The Luciano Story is probably most useful as an early glimpse into the legend of Lucania’s contribution to the U.S. war effort (a subject dealt with in more detail within The Luciano Project by Rodney Campbell, Mafia Allies by Timothy Newark and related works) and as an illustration of postwar political partisanship.28

“It does not happen often that an author feels compelled to repudiate his own book.”

That was the opening line of a four-page statement issued to the press by author Joachim Joesten just days after the January 1955 release of The Luciano Story. That an author would put out such a statement certainly was a rarity. That the situation involved Thomas Dewey and Salvatore “Charlie Luciano” Lucania made it history.

→ Late in 2025, I received an email from author Christian Cipollini, asking for my thoughts on the 1946 release of Lucania from prison. Then-Governor Thomas E. Dewey commuted the bulk of Lucania’s thirty-to-fifty-year compulsory prostitution sentence to allow his deportation, citing Lucania’s alleged assistance to the U.S. military during World War II. As you likely recall, Dewey, in his earlier role as a prosecutor, had succeeded in getting Lucania convicted on the prostitution charges about a decade earlier.1

That the man responsible for Lucania’s imprisonment was also responsible for freeing him, has prompted a number of accusations over the years. Narcotics agent Sal Vizzini, for example, claimed in a 1972 book (See “The Vizzini book’s chameleon cover”) that Lucania extorted his way out of prison after his attorneys uncovered damaging information on Dewey.2

“In your opinion,” Christian asked (among other things), “did Dewey commute Luciano purely on parole board/military recommendation? Or, out of blackmail? Or, a combination of things?” Christian used portions of my response to him in a January 2026 article he wrote for The Mob Museum’s website.3

When considering his questions, I rechecked a number of sources, including Dewey’s autobiography, the summary report of New York State’s 1954 “Herlands investigation” into Lucania’s release4 and Joachim Joesten’s independently published 1955 work, Dewey, Luciano, And I. This last source, not widely available, expanded Joesten’s four-page press release repudiation of The Luciano Story into a 100-page anti-Dewey conspiracy theory. At that moment, it seemed to me that the largely forgotten story around The Luciano Story may be a good deal more interesting than the book itself. (I’ll let you decide.) ←

Joesten worked on The Luciano Story in roughly the same period as two other organized crime-related books. Dope, Inc., released in pocket paperback format by Avon in 1953, dealt with international narcotics rackets. Vice, Inc., released in 1954 by Ace Books, focused on human trafficking rings. Lucania, whose record included convictions for narcotics (in 1916) and compulsory prostitution (in 1936), had apparent connections to both illicit enterprises.5

A New York publishing house, the David McKay Company, contracted with Joesten in mid-December of 1952 to write a biography of Lucania. Joesten spent the spring of 1953 in Italy, gathering information and making a successful but unspectacular effort to interview Lucania. His research on this project and on the earlier Dope, Inc., brought him in contact with agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN).6

In those days, the FBN was in the habit of labeling the exiled Lucania as the leader of a vast underworld organization that smuggled narcotics from the Mediterranean region into the U.S. (The FBN noted a sharp increase in heroin traffic in the U.S. after Lucania’s deportation and was inclined to attribute it to Lucania rather than other factors, including dramatically improved opportunities for travel and commerce between Europe and the U.S., and European economic difficulties in the period after World War II.) This guided the public to the belief that all narcotics traffickers belonged to a single criminal conspiracy overseen by Lucania. It had an ancillary effect of blaming New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey for the “slow murder” of drug-addicted Americans. Dewey was awarded that responsibility because of the sentence commutation and deportation that put the mob boss in Italy, in a position to lead the supposed international narcotics operation.7

Joesten seems to have accepted, at least to a degree, the FBN position on Lucania and the culpability of Dewey. Joesten’s own left-leaning political philosophy, clearly at odds with that of the staunch anti-communist (and anti-New Deal) Dewey, was likely a factor in that acceptance.

Joesten delivered a first version of his manuscript to the publisher in June of 1953, and he then received a final installment of his contractual book advance. But a problem quickly arose. McKay had reached an agreement with another publisher, Popular Library, to produce a pocket paperback edition of the book, but Popular Library wasn’t at all thrilled with Joesten’s manuscript. The paperback publisher wanted “a more dramatic and lively treatment” with greater focus on Lucania’s adventures in the U.S.

Joesten punched up the prose and delivered a second version. In summer, David McKay Company announced that The Luciano Story by Joachim Joesten would be released soon. The publisher stated, “This is the first complete and up-to-date story of the life of Lucky Luciano, one of the most notorious criminal masterminds of the century.” Its announcement stated that the book was based on Joesten’s research, including an interview with the subject.8

It turned out that Popular Library didn’t care for the second version either. By autumn, Kenneth L. Rawson, president of the David McKay Company, proposed that another author be brought in to rewrite the Joesten manuscript. The publisher and Joesten mutually agreed on Sid Feder, who had coauthored the 1951 book, Murder, Inc., with former Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Burton Turkus.

→ Murder, Inc., contained a number of interesting - and difficult/impossible to defend - ideas, including the underworld’s generational “Mustache Petes” vs. “Young Turks” struggle, the 1930s replacement of the traditional Mafia by a new-fangled organization called “Unione,” and a two-day purge of thirty to forty mafiosi following the September 1931 assassination of Salvatore Maranzano. (See also: “How did a gang of killers become ‘incorporated’?” and “Were Mafia’s ‘Mustache Petes’ pushed out by ‘Young Turks’?”) ←

According to Joesten, the book contract for The Luciano Story was revised to include Sid Feder. Feder was awarded a one-third interest in the book in exchange for a complete rewrite and the addition of about 30 percent new material. The book’s new double byline was to read, “by Joachim Joesten and Sid Feder.”9

Feder turned in the revised manuscript to McKay near the start of 1954 – a bit later than his mid-November 1953 deadline, according to Joesten. Joesten reviewed the work and noticed that there had been a change in tone, showing “a certain tendency to humor Gov. Dewey” and to criticize agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Joesten was sensitive on those subjects, but the change was subtle, and Joesten felt he could live with the revision. He gave his approval.10

The Luciano Story was on the publisher’s schedule for a May 1954 press run. In April, however, Joesten was told that there would be a delay of a few weeks. That delay reportedly was requested by Dewey, after the governor read through the page proofs. Apparently, Dewey convinced Kenneth Rawson that there would soon be new information on the Lucania release and that the book would benefit from the wait.11

Joesten found that irritating. It became more irritating when the delay was extended. Joesten was well aware that the governor had run for U.S. President in 1940 (failed to win Republican nomination), 1944 (lost general election to Franklin Roosevelt) and 1948 (lost general election to Harry Truman). While Dewey chose not to run in 1952, it was widely believed that he took on a kingmaker role for Republican nominee Dwight Eisenhower, and Dewey appeared to have strong influence within the Eisenhower Administration. Another Dewey run for President appeared likely as his third term as governor neared its end (January 1, 1955) and the campaign season for the 1956 Presidential election approached. Joesten felt that Dewey was meddling with The Luciano Story simply because he viewed it as a threat to his political future.

When later writing about this concern in the book, Dewey, Luciano, And I, Joesten revealed that he was not the only person who felt that way. He noted that journalist Danton Walker expressed similar sentiments in a June 1954 column:

Publication of a book about racketeers, including Lucky Luciano, may be postponed three months at the request of a prominent politician who thinks it might set back his ambitions for a Washington post.12

→ Walker’s published statement is verified, but it is not actually evidence that he independently arrived at this thought. Joesten was well connected to media figures. He could easily have planted the idea of Dewey’s selfish motivation. If Walker had not been in touch with Joesten, it is tough to explain the columnist’s awareness of the situation. ←

Joesten complained about the holdup to the publisher in September of 1954. In October, he was promised that the book would be released in November. It was then that Joesten was informed of a specific reason for the delay. Governor Dewey had appointed William B. Herlands to conduct a state investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Lucania release. Herlands’ work was completed on September 17, 1954. While the investigation remained secret, Herlands’ findings were provided to Sid Feder for use in The Luciano Story. Yet another rewrite was done to the book.13

Unsurprisingly, that Dewey-commissioned investigation found that Dewey had taken no unusual or questionable steps in commuting the bulk of Lucania’s compulsory prostitution sentence and was merely dutifully following the recommendation of the state parole board. Herlands said he learned that U.S. military personnel impressed the parole board with information about Lucania’s considerable contributions to the war effort.14

Near the middle of November, Joesten received a collection of page proofs and a request to hurry his approval. The presses were set to begin rolling the following day.

But Joesten was stunned by that fourth version of the book. He penned a letter to McKay’s president. “I thoroughly dislike and object to the political slant the book has now been given,” he protested.

The author complained about “snide remarks” directed at the late President Franklin Roosevelt, Senator Estes Kefauver and the crime-investigating Kefauver Committee. He noted that agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics were subjected to “scorn and abuse.” And a new chapter – “Lucky and Operation Underworld” – was added to the book to defend the legend of imprisoned Lucania’s wartime aid to the military and to justify the Dewey commutation. “What I suspected all along - that the book was being held up merely to accommodate Governor Dewey - is now painfully evident,” he stated. Joesten withheld his formal approval and promised to make his opposition to the book publicly known.

Rawson and Joesten exchanged some telephone calls during November. The publishing executive gave Joesten the option of removing his name from the book he found so objectionable. Joesten refused.15

Dewey and his Republican administration left office on New Year’s Day, 1955. The new governor was William Averell Harriman, a Democrat. A week later, The Luciano Story was released. The $3.75 book bore an unexpected byline: “By Sid Feder and Joachim Joesten.” The coauthors names had been switched. Early reviews played up the book’s story of Lucania’s assistance to the military and noted its harsh criticism of narcotics agents.

Feder and Joesten are acid in their criticism of the Narcotics ace men, Henry J. Anslinger, Charles A. Siragusa and George White. To these men, they say ‘put up or shut up’ in reply to the many sensational statements the narcotics bureau is constantly releasing to the press.16

Joesten’s repudiation of The Luciano Story was mailed out as the book was hitting store shelves. It was not received at major newspapers until after early book reviews had been published. Some of the papers receiving his press release simply ignored it.

The Chicago Daily Tribune was one of the newspapers that reported on the controversy. Under a January 14, Page 4 headline reading, “Charges Dewey put whitewash in Luciano book,” the Tribune outlined the book’s history and Joesten’s numerous complaints about the rewritten work, including his position on Dewey’s apparently self-serving manipulation of the publishing process:

Joesten charged that the altered portions had the effect of justifying Dewey’s release of Luciano. The gangster, convicted of compulsory prostitution in 1936 and sentenced to 30 to 50 years, was released 10 years later by Dewey. Dewey’s action has been widely criticized.

The newspaper printed responses by Kenneth Rawson to some of Joesten’s accusations. According to Rawson, it was only natural for the publisher to consult with Dewey on the book, as he “figured in the Luciano case as both prosecutor and governor.” When Dewey was asked for comment, Rawson said, the governor revealed that there was a great deal of new information on the subject and agreed to provide access “to make the book complete and accurate.”17

Joesten must have felt some satisfaction when it appeared in mid-January that his objections to the book had succeeded in reopening the New York State investigation into the Lucania commutation. Governor Harriman had appointed Judge J. Irwin Shapiro to the post of Commissioner of Investigations previously held by Herlands (who soon was appointed to a federal judgeship by President Eisenhower). And Shapiro seemed inclined to look into the matter.

On Monday, January 17, Joesten was called to meet with Shapiro in New York City. After a two-hour discussion, Joesten told members of the press that Shapiro showed “deep interest” in what he had to say, and he believed the case had been reopened. Shapiro declined to make a statement, noting a Dewey-era rule forbidding disclosures relating to his official functions: “Under the law, it is improper for any member of the commissioner’s office to make any disclosure on any investigations under way.”18

Little news from any Shapiro investigation surfaced. And the publisher of The Luciano Story may have had the last laugh in the matter. Following published reports that the state probe into Lucania commutation circumstances had been reopened, the David McKay Company began an advertising campaign for The Luciano Story as, “The book that’s re-opened the Luciano case!”19

→ Joachim Franz Joesten was born June 28, 1907, in Cologne, western Germany. His father was Doctor Joseph Joesten. His mother was Amalie von Nesselrode-Hugenpoet, reportedly of noble descent. As a young adult in the late 1920s, Joesten was linked to German communism. A later report of Nazi Germany’s Gestapo secret police indicated that Joesten became a member of the communist party. (Whether you accept Gestapo statements as factual or not, this makes it clear that Joesten was no friend of the Nazi establishment.)20

Joesten left Germany in 1933, following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. He lived in France and then in Denmark, where his writings warned of the threat of Nazism. When Germany invaded Denmark, Joesten fled to Sweden. In that country he married May Nilsson on September 8, 1940. Joesten and his wife subsequently traveled to the United States, reportedly through the Soviet Union and China, with a stop in the Central American nation of Costa Rica. (Costa Rica at the time was freeing itself from the influence of powerful coffee plantation owners and establishing a more socialist system under President Rafael Angel Calderon.) The Joestens reached New York in April of 1941. Daughter Ingrid was born to the couple in New York five months later.21

Upon his arrival in the U.S., Joesten worked for The Nation, a progressive periodical. He soon became an assistant editor in the foreign department of Newsweek magazine. He lived with his wife and daughter in Jackson Heights, Queens, for a couple of years before moving to Elmhurst, Queens. Joesten became a freelance journalist, specializing in international affairs, with the 1944 release of his book, What Russia Wants.22

He was naturalized a U.S. citizen in 1948, at about the same time that the Joesten family moved to Hartsville, just outside Great Barrington in southwestern Massachusetts. (It seems Joesten also continued to rent an apartment in New York City in this period.) Another book, Germany: What Now? was released in that year. The 1950 U.S. Census found Joachim, May and Ingrid Joesten living in a private home just south of the Great Barrington town line.23

In that period, Joesten spent about half of each year traveling in Europe, collecting data for his writing. He became interested in reporting on narcotics trafficking between Europe and the United States and the crusade of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The Avon pocket paperback Dope, Inc., was the result. Late in 1952, he received the unusual assignment of gathering information on a former U.S. organized crime figure, Salvatore “Charlie Luciano” Lucania.24

Immediately following the controversy over The Luciano Story, during which Joesten self-published a short book that harshly criticized repeat-Republican Presidential candidate Thomas Dewey, Joesten was widely labeled a communist. The U.S. State Department of the Eisenhower Administration held up his passport renewal and demanded he provide a non-communist affidavit. He denied ever being a communist and threatened a libel suit.25

In the 1960s, when he resided on McGee Road in South Egremont, southwest of Great Barrington, Joesten authored books including Nasser: The Rise to Power, The Red Hand, They Call It Intelligence: Spies and Spy Techniques Since World War II. In December of 1963, Joesten traveled to Dallas, Texas, to research the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.26

He became one of the first Kennedy Assassination conspiracy theorists when he wrote, Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? While asserting that Lee Harvey Oswald had been involved in the Kennedy assassination, Joesten insisted that he held a minor role (that Oswald was the “patsy” he claimed to be) and that U.S. intelligence, military and industrial figures were deeply involved. The Oswald book was initially to be published only overseas, but Joesten found an interested U.S. publisher in Carl Marzani. Years later, Marzani was identified as a tool of Soviet intelligence through notes smuggled out of the Soviet Union by Vasili Mitrokhin. (At least one conservative columnist used that to justify the statement that “Joesten was funded by the KGB.”)27

Joesten’s later works focused almost exclusively on Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. Records indicate that he died in August 1975, but they do not provide details. The Social Security Death Index states that his last known address was with the U.S. consulate in Stuttgart, Germany, suggesting that he passed away while traveling.28 ←

Read and interact with MobHistory’s short-form content in Substack Notes.

The February visit to Kingston Penitentiary in Kingston, Ontario, was discussed in a recent article, “Informant drew William Flynn to Canada in late winter 1903.” Flynn was enticed to make that trip by the offer of jailed counterfeiter Salvatore Clemente (known in Canada as Joseph Gentile) to become a Secret Service informant.

Flynn returned from Canada on February 5, 1903, armed with some information about a few U.S. counterfeiters and with a greater understanding of the Mafia in the New York area. In particular, Flynn learned from Clemente that Mafia boss Giuseppe Morello had decided, along with Mafia leaders Domenico Pecoraro and Joseph Trovato, to arrange the July 1902 “Sack Murder” of a Brooklyn mafioso known as “Joe the Grocer” Catania (known to Flynn as Giuseppe DiTrapani and known to some others as Joseph Caldani, Joseph Carus, John Crotanno...). Catania reportedly knew too much, drank too often and spoke too freely when drunk to be permitted to live.1

(See also: “Brooklyn’s 1902 ‘Sack Murder’”)

Secret Service agents of the Flynn-led New York office had been trailing Morello for some time, believing him involved in the counterfeiting of U.S. currency. Their intense surveillance continued in the weeks after Flynn returned from his trip.

Flynn was back in the city less than ten weeks, when on Monday, April 13, 1903, his men observed Morello and associates in lower Manhattan, conducting a number of nighttime meetings involving a stranger. The next morning, a nearly beheaded male body turned up inside a barrel left on a Manhattan sidewalk. There were no identifying papers with the body, but Flynn’s agents noted that the victim’s description matched the stranger they had seen.2

Flynn sent Special Operative John J. Henry and Assistant Operative George L. Burns to meet with NYPD Captain John Becker of the Union Market Police Precinct (Becker had been moved into command of that precinct on January 14, 1903, to take the place of Captain Michael Gorman, who was suspended for neglect of duty) and to view the body of the victim at the morgue. The agents positively identified the body as the stranger observed with Morello and members of his gang. Secret Service Assistant Operative Lawrence Ricci made a similar trip later in the day and provided the same identification.3

Late on the night of Tuesday, April 14, NYPD Inspector “Chesty George” McClusky, Inspector Max Schmittberger, Captain Becker and two police detectives (these were unnamed, but Petrosino may have been one of them) met with Flynn at the Secret Service offices. Flynn provided the police with available information on the “movements and connections of Morrello et al.” The shared data likely included the Clemente-supplied information about Morello’s involvement in the Sack Murder. Flynn had noted similarities in the stabbings of both victims.4

In return for his information, Flynn asked that he be given advance notice of any arrests, so Secret Service men could be present to check for counterfeiting evidence. Police arrested Giuseppe Morello and much of his gang the following day. Flynn spent that day at Police Headquarters, directing his Secret Service men to the spots he wanted searched.5

By Thursday, the sixteenth of April, thirteen suspects were in custody. (After listing the suspects in his Secret Service daily report, Flynn made special mention of Vito Cascioferro, who was not apprehended. Flynn assigned his men to watch for Cascioferro at his known hangouts, but the mafioso was able to escape to Louisiana and then back to Sicily.) The suspects included Morello and Pecoraro, who Clemente said were responsible for the Sack Murder. The NYPD’s earlier investigation of Catania’s killing in Brooklyn had fizzled. But the leads introduced by Flynn/Clemente sparked new interest. The Secret Service found no counterfeiting evidence against the arrested men but seized a pile of correspondence and set to work identifying the senders and translating the documents into English.6

Combining information from the Secret Service and some tips, Inspector McClusky determined that the Barrel Murder victim was a brother-in-law of Giuseppe DiPrima, a counterfeiter recently imprisoned at Sing Sing. NYPD Detective Joseph Petrosino brought a photograph of the victim to the prison and met with DiPrima. The prisoner identified the image as his brother-in-law Benedetto Madonia of Buffalo, New York. Petrosino traveled on to Buffalo to verify the identification.7

In the late morning of Friday, April 24, Inspector McClusky telephoned Flynn and asked if he would be willing to accompany Detective Petrosino and a stenographer named Hughes on a trip back to Kingston Penitentiary to interview Salvatore Clemente about the Sack Murder of “Joe the Grocer” Catania. Flynn said he would need the NYPD to provide a day’s salary plus expenses (U.S. Secret Service agents were regularly hired out to other law enforcement agencies in that era). The terms apparently were accepted.

Flynn sent a telegram about his travel plans to Secret Service Chief John E. Wilkie in Washington, D.C.: “Unless otherwise instructed will leave tonight for Kingston Canada, with interpreter and stenographer, to interview Clementi. Police to pay all expenses.” Then he wired Colonel Arthur Percy (Sir Percy) Sherwood, head of Canada’s Dominion Police Force: “Will you please arrange so I can get in Kingston Prison tomorrow with Interpreter, to talk with Joseph Gentile.”8

But McClusky then called for Flynn again in the late afternoon of the twenty-fourth. Flynn was away from the office at the time. He returned the call at close to six o’clock and stated the result in his daily report: “[McClusky] informed me that there had been some important developements in the Madonia case, and requested that the Kingston matter rest for a few days.” Flynn did not explain what the “developements” were.9

McClusky may have felt that he could not spare Petrosino at that critical moment. Or, possibly, the inspector believed that he could obtain the same or better information against the Morello organization through the expected cooperation of DiPrima. Or he may simply have determined that Salvatore Clemente retelling what had been told to him about the Sack Murder wasn’t worth the trip. (As you likely recall, the Barrel Murder case gradually fell apart, and Morello and associates were not charged in connection with the Sack Murder. The law scored counterfeiting convictions against Morello and much of his organization early in 1910.)

But that meant another round of Flynn telegrams. At six-forty-five he wired Wilkie: “Kingston matter off for the present...” And then he sent a message to Sherwood: “Have to put the Kingston matter off for a few days, will wire you when I leave for there.”10

Flynn received a letter from Colonel Sherwood on April 26:

Immediately upon the receipt of your telegram, I had a letter written by the Deputy Minister of Justice, arranging that you, accompanied by an Interpreter should see Joseph Gentile when you call at Kingston Penitentiary. I got your subsequent message, that you had delayed going, for some days, but this authority will hold good whenever you go there.11

The planned Flynn return visit to Kingston Penitentiary with Detective Joseph Petrosino seems not to have occurred within a few days of April 24 or at all. (If anyone has found record of Flynn and Petrosino traveling to Kingston together, I hope you will share it.)

The trip hasn’t received much attention. That is possibly because its mention is incorrectly placed in the National Archive’s collection of Flynn’s daily reports. It may also be due to Flynn’s mislabeling of some of the related reports with January dates, when they should have had February dates. Researchers also may have decided that trip was just not that interesting.1

The 1903 Canada adventure was not Flynn’s first trip north of the border. And it was far less dramatic than some of Flynn’s guns-drawn encounters with outlaw gangs. However, it produced an eye-opening bit of history and, at one stage, it did create an adrenaline-triggering threat to the life of the federal sleuth.

Clemente

Salvatore Clemente had been an important member of a gang of coin counterfeiters in the New York area. The group included famous female counterfeiter Stella Frauto (described by some as Salvatore Clemente’s wife, though early accounts mention different spouses for both of them) and, for a time, mafioso Vito Cascioferro. It was well connected to Giuseppe Morello’s New York-based Mafia organization, which Secret Service agents were investigating for the counterfeiting of banknotes.

The gang tangled repeatedly with the U.S. Secret Service. Salvatore Clemente was sent off to prison in the late 1890s. When released, he returned to the New York area and to the work of creating and circulating phony coins.2

→ I must confess that I have never been entirely comfortable with the use of the unusual surname “Frauto.” Knowing that other members of the gang had surnames written like “Franko” and “Franco” and that a number of the gang members were related to each other by blood or by marriage, it has seemed to me that “Stella Frauto” might have been “Estella Franco,” except for a careless bit of official handwriting that was endlessly repeated. ←

In May of 1902, a Secret Service raid of a building at Hackensack, New Jersey, discovered coin molds and several hundred dollars worth of counterfeit coins. Immediately after that raid, several gang members, including Frauto and Cascioferro, were arrested by Secret Service agents. One of the captured suspects was a Giuseppe Clemente, but Salvatore Clemente managed to slip away.3

William Flynn and other agents pursued both Salvatore Clemente and fellow gang member Andrea Romano. In November, Clemente was tracked to a Toronto grocery, 353 Spadina Avenue (an address that now sits in Toronto’s Chinatown neighborhood). Secret Service agent Flynn went with a local detective to make the November 1902 arrest of Clemente. The two law enforcement officers observed Clemente in the act of manufacturing counterfeit U.S. and Canadian coins as they nabbed him. Then, using a faked letter from Clemente, authorities located Romano at Niagara Falls, New York, and charged him in the U.S.4

When Clemente, using the alias of “Joseph Gentile,” was brought to a preliminary examination in a Toronto court on Friday, November 21, his defense counsel T.C. Robinette, K.C. (“Kings Counsel” – honorary title), possibly believing the prosecution was unprepared, demanded immediate trial. But Crown Attorney (prosecutor) J. Walter Curry, K.C., was entirely ready and jumped at the opportunity. He brought arresting officer Davis into court as his first witness. And called Agent Flynn to the stand to back up Davis’s testimony and provide additional perspective on the case.

The defense attempted to argue that Clemente was no more than a tool for the real counterfeiter. An associate, who escaped at the time that Clemente was arrested, was the real outlaw, said Robinette. The argument had no weight, as Clemente and his activities were well known to Flynn since 1895, and Clemente was clearly engaged in producing counterfeit at the time of his arrest. Clemente was quickly convicted of two offenses. For manufacturing counterfeit Canadian coins, he was sentenced to ten years in prison. For manufacturing counterfeit foreign (U.S.) coins, he was sentenced to three years. The terms were set to run concurrently in Kingston Penitentiary.5

Following the arrest, there were reports that the U.S. would push to have Clemente extradited to face charges in New York federal court. But, taking note of the speedy prosecution and lengthy sentence of the Canadian case, U.S. officials seemed content to let that run its course.6

→ Kingston Penitentiary was already a historic landmark when Clemente became a prisoner there. Opened in 1835, the penitentiary sat on the city’s St. Lawrence River/Lake Ontario waterfront, just to the east of Portsmouth Harbor/Hatter’s Bay. Despite its aging condition, the prison lived on for more than another century. It was finally closed down in 2013 and entered retirement as a national historic site and tourist attraction.7 ←

Trek

Early in 1903, Flynn learned that Salvatore Clemente was interested in cooperating with the U.S. authorities. That was an enticing opportunity, as Clemente could tell of the activities of other counterfeiters and could serve as a window into the New York-area Mafia. Flynn made arrangements to travel to Kingston, Ontario, and meet with the counterfeiter.

On Monday, February 2, 1903, Flynn received a telegram from Rufus Gardner Chamberlin, aide to Colonel Arthur Percy (Sir Percy) Sherwood, the commissioner of Canada’s Dominion Police Force. Chamberlin advised Flynn that police personnel were prepared to meet him at the British American Hotel, at the intersection of Clarence and King streets in Kingston, the following day. At quarter after three that afternoon, Flynn sent a telegram to his superior, Acting Secret Service Chief William Herman Moran in Washington, D.C.: “Will leave tonight for Kingston, Ont, address there British American Hotel.”8

→ Rufus Chamberlin was made inspector of the Dominion Police Force’s Secret Services branch later in 1903. While his home and headquarters were in Ottawa, he frequently traveled on assignments. He left the Dominion Police in spring 1907 to become chief of police in the City of Vancouver. Early in 1913, he moved on to serve as chief of the Investigation Department of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. Soon after that, he was appointed chief of police of Canada East. He died near Christmas of 1923 following surgeries at Royal Victoria Hospital. The sixty-year-old police official was survived by his wife and their six children.9 ←

Flynn did not note his precise travel plans, but these most likely involved many hours of train travel on the New York Central lines from Midtown Manhattan north to Albany, then west to Utica, Rome or Syracuse and then north again to the border community of Cape Vincent, New York. Flynn did report that he arrived at Cape Vincent just before ten o’clock, Tuesday morning, February 3.10

Benefiting from the commerce provided by road, rail and water travel, Cape Vincent was then a small but “bustling” town on the St. Lawrence River virtually surrounded by dairy farms. It was probably best known as the home of the Tibbett’s Point Lighthouse (about two and a half miles southwest of the Cape Vincent downtown), which marked the entrance to the St. Lawrence River from Lake Ontario. With some miles and natural obstacles still standing between him and his destination, Flynn probably had little time on this trip to appreciate the community.11

In warmer seasons, ferries carried people across the St. Lawrence River from Cape Vincent to Canada’s Wolfe Island and then (across another branch of the St. Lawrence) from Wolfe Island to the “Limestone City” of Kingston. No ferries ran in early February. In their place, horse-drawn sleighs took travelers across frozen portions of the river.

In Flynn’s report for Tuesday, February 3, he indicated that he “proceeded by sleigh across the St. Lawrence River, arriving at Kingston at 11:45 A.M.” and registering at the British American Hotel. (That hotel, standing on the site of historic Kingston inns dating back to 1791, had opened in 1866. The British American burned down in 1963. The site has since become home to a large, modern hotel that in recent years has been named the Four Points Sheraton, the Kingston Market Square Hotel and the Kingston Marriott.)12

Detective Chamberlin met Flynn at the hotel at four o’clock that afternoon. The two men traveled together to the penitentiary, a couple of miles to the west. When they reached the facility, they were advised that the prisoners already had been locked up for the night and no meeting with Salvatore Clemente, known in the prison as Joseph Gentile, would be possible until the next morning. Flynn set up an appointment for nine-thirty on Wednesday.13

Flynn and Chamberlin returned to the penitentiary the next morning and met with Clemente. Chamberlin explained to the prisoner that he was authorized by Colonel Sherwood to make helpful recommendations on Clemente’s behalf if he provided any useful information.

Meeting

Flynn questioned Clemente on subjects mentioned in a letter from Clemente to his nephew Antonio Franco. Franco earlier had provided the Clemente letter to the office of the Assistant U.S. Attorney Ernest E. Baldwin of the Southern District of New York. (In May 1903, prosecutor Ernest Baldwin made news by engaging in a public physical scuffle with Post Office Inspector John Frank Oldfield, who was visiting New York from Ohio. The fight resulted from angry words exchanged during Oldfield questioning related to a vending machine scandal. Oldfield later became famous for helping to dismantle a Mafia-linked Midwest criminal organization known as the Society of the Banana.)14

Clemente spoke about the 1902 Brooklyn “sack murder” of a mafioso widely known as “Joe the Grocer” Catania and referred to by Flynn as Giuseppe DiTrapani. Flynn recorded the information in a run-on sentence in his report of the meeting:

Clemente says he does not know who committed the murder, but does know that Giuseppe Morello, Dominico Pecorara (This is #1 of the Morrello gang) and Joseph Travato who resides in Brooklyn, are the three men who put up the job to have Ditrapani murdered, and that Ditrapani was a member of the Mafia and was a man given to drink and talked too much when drink and knew too much about the Mafia, and on this account was murdered.15 (Note: This information was mentioned in the recent article, “Secret Service operatives followed Morello in New Orleans.”)

Clemente said he learned all that from a connection named Antonio Casano. The prisoner provided little information about Casano but seemed to be trying to blame Casano for Clemente’s own involvement in the Toronto coin counterfeiting operation. Basically sticking to the story he gave at his trial, Clemente asserted that Casano, the real counterfeiter, left through a rear door of the Spadina Avenue building and escaped over a fence just as Flynn and Davis entered to make the arrest.

In his report, Flynn revealed that he considered this part of Clemente’s statement to be false:

I am positive this is not true, for the reason that the rear door... was locked and the key was in the inside, and outside of the door, in the yard, the soil was soft and muddy, and there were no footprints.

Casano was described by Clemente as being about thirty to thirty-two years old, short, stout, with a red mustache. “He is acquainted in New York, N.Y., in the vicinity of Prince and Elizabeth Sts,” Flynn added. The Secret Service agent noted that Clemente’s description of Casano’s appearance and connections to the Morello Mob stronghold in Manhattan “may be true.”16

According to Clemente, a man named Alfonso Cozenzo introduced him to Casano, and a Toronto fruit dealer named Bartolo Dina first put him in touch with Cozenzo. Clemente suggested that law enforcement could locate Casano by following a similar path – Dina to Cozenzo to Casano.

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The prisoner then discussed the counterfeiting of banknotes by the Morello organization: “...Giuseppe Morrello, Dominico Pecoraro, #1, Ignazio Lupo, #2, and a man Crocervera (Isadoro Crocervera who is now awaiting trial for passing Counterfeit Morristown notes) and Paolo Marchesa (no doubt Paolo Saitta who sometimes says his name is Marchesa) are the people who are handling Counterfeit $5.00 notes. Clemente claims that he never saw any of the Counterfeit notes, and cannot describe them. Morrello is the leader of the Gang...” (Isidore Crocevera and other suspects had been arrested at the end of December 1902 and charged with distributing counterfeit currency in Yonkers, New York. Crocevera and codefendants Joseph DiPrima and Giuseppe Giallombardo were convicted in New York federal court and received prison sentenced on March 17, 1903.)17

Clemente added some information about coin counterfeiters. He mentioned a Joe Montaldo, about thirty-five, frequently seen around Stanton and Chrystie streets in Manhattan, who was engaged in making phony coins. And he pointed to another coin counterfeiter in Chicago: “...He says Mariano Zagone of #97 Milton Ave. Chicago Ill. is making Cft. coin, and a few days watching will prove it.”

Following his mention of Chicago mafioso Zagone, Clemente told a story about New Orleans grocer Salvatore LoBiundo, who was in regular communication with the New York-based Morello. According to Clemente, LoBiundo became aware that an underling named Joe Companion had stolen money from LoBiundo and fled toward Chicago. LoBiundo then wrote to Mariano Zagone, asking him to kill Companion.

Clemente apparently stopped short of providing any evidence against other members of the Clemente-Frauto organization. He claimed to know nothing of the coin counterfeiting plant raided in May 1902 at Hackensack, New Jersey, insisting he was in Buffalo, New York, in that period.18

Home

Flynn concluded his interview of Clemente and arranged with the Kingston warden to get in touch if Clemente wished to make any additional statement. At one o’clock in the afternoon, according to his daily report, he wired Washington, D.C., to let superiors know that he was heading home.

He stated that he would be traveling to New York via Montreal, rather than retracing his path through Cape Vincent. With Montreal sitting about 200 miles northeast of Kingston, the new route probably increased the distance of Flynn’s trip by about 50 percent over his previous course.

Flynn revealed the justification for the change:

I would have returned via Cape Vincent but it was decided unsafe to cross the St. Lawrence river, in fact, I had a narrow escape going to Kingston, as the ice was not over Three inches thick over the Channel.19

He did not elaborate on what must have been a harrowing experience on the thin ice. While the local press seemed not to notice Flynn’s “narrow escape,” some attention was paid to the poor condition of river ice in the region. One report from that time suggested that the winter’s heavy early snows atop thin river ice prevented that ice from growing to a safe thickness. That report said that a number of lumber-hauling sleighs and horse teams had been lost through ice accidents.20

Flynn began his journey home at one-seventeen that afternoon. At midnight, he was still traveling. He reached New York City just before seven-thirty on Thursday morning, February 5. The trip consumed more than eighteen hours. By nine o’clock, he was back in his Manhattan office.21

The tales of Mafia boss Giuseppe Morello conveyed through various publications by former Secret Service Agent William J. Flynn (see Part 1) represent a small fraction of the information accumulated by the service. And that fraction may not be entirely accurate. Flynn appears to have taken some liberties - literary license - in his published tellings. Fortunately, the National Archives has preserved the original daily reports of Flynn and other agents, who documented the activities of Morello and his associates in a just-the-facts style.

Operatives of the Secret Service kept a watchful eye on Morello around the time he traveled to the Crescent City in the fall of 1903. Their reports may account for details that went into the later published stories by William Flynn. While the Luciano brothers - Antonino and Salvadore - had already been murdered in their feud with the Mafia by the time of the trip, the specifics contained in the reports suggest that Morello was intimately involved with the individuals and activities of the New Orleans underworld.

Planning a trip

Secret Service agents had not seen Giuseppe Morello for several days before Thursday, October 29, 1903. On that day, Special Operative John H. Helms noted Morello emerging from an apartment building on Second Avenue between 107th and 108th streets in East Harlem. Helms tried to follow Morello from a distance, but the Mafia boss apparently suspected he was being watched. “He turned often and appeared to be looking for a shadow,” Helms reported. Morello walked down to First Avenue, then back along 107th Street to Second Avenue and turned northeast on Second. When Helms got to that corner, Morello was gone.1

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A team of agents turned out to closely watch Morello’s movements, meetings and interactions during the middle of the day on Friday, October 30, 1903. Special Operative Lucien C. Wheeler, Special Operative John H. Helms and Assistant Operative Louis Ricci tracked Morello around lower Manhattan.2

The Mafia boss made stops at Mulberry Bend, at the Staatz Zeitung Building, at City Hall Park, at the intersection of Greenwich and Reade streets and at nearby Duane Park where Duane Street meets Hudson Street.

(Agent Ricci’s reporting appeared to place the Staatz Zeitung Building, headquarters of a famous German-American newspaper, at “Bridge and Bowery.” But Ricci may have been adding “Bridge and Bowery” – perhaps the area where New Bowery crossed under the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge – as a separate location. The Staatz Zeitung Building was a few blocks west of that spot. The famous structure sat on Tryon Row between Park Row and Centre Street, just east of City Hall Park.)3

Along the way, Morello met and spoke with associates identified by the Secret Service agents as “Zaconi” (likely 1903 “Barrel Murder” suspect Giovanni Zarcone), “Yockino,” (phonetically similar to “Iacono” and possibly a Morello mob member named LoIacono) and unnamed stranger “#1” (#1 was identified elsewhere as Domenico Pecoraro, another “Barrel Murder” suspect and also revealed through informant Salvatore Clemente to have conspired with Morello and Giuseppe Trovato in planning the 1902 Brooklyn “Sack Murder” of “Joe the Grocer” Catania).4

Here and there, Morello and his companions stopped and “talked earnestly.” Zaconi left about three in the afternoon, as Morello and #1 went to Prince Street, between Elizabeth Street and the Bowery. From just before four o’clock until about four-thirty, Morello was seen popping in and out of locations along Prince Street and nearby Elizabeth Street. During that period, Zaconi returned. Then, suddenly, the group of three men rushed out toward the south. According to Agent Ricci, they were “almost running the entire distance between Prince and Grand,” about a third of a mile.5

From there, they made their way toward the area where they spent the earlier part of the day. Their destination was the Cooks travel agency at Broadway and Warren streets. That location was across the street and just to the west of City Hall Park and about a third of a mile southeast of Duane Park. A well-dressed man greeted them. Morello and #1 went inside the ticket agency with the well-dressed man, while Zaconi remained outside. Through the agency’s window, Agent Ricci saw Morello looking over a “long green ticket.” After about fifteen minutes, Morello, #1 and Zaconi left together. Ricci followed them, while Operative Wheeler went into the Cooks agency to see what he could casually learn about the ticket.6

Ricci watched as Zaconi boarded a streetcar. Morello and #1 again went briefly inside the Staatz Zeitung building and then returned to the Prince Street neighborhood. Morello stopped to converse with Pietro Inzerillo and then he went inside 253 Elizabeth Street.7

Agents Helms and Ricci went out to East Harlem on Saturday to watch for Morello. They saw him emerge from the apartment building at 329 East 106th Street (home of the Morello-Terranova family) around noon, and they looked on as he took an early afternoon walk to a pool room at 232 East 104th Street. The agents returned to their office about four o’clock.8

On the same day, Special Operative Wheeler went to the Cooks agency and learned that, during the late Friday afternoon visit, Morello had purchased two round-trip Pennsylvania Railroad tickets for New Orleans, an a route through Washington D.C., costing $50 apiece. The train was to leave from Jersey City, New Jersey, just after midnight on Tuesday, November 3.9

Late Monday night, Wheeler and Ricci took the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Courtland Street Ferry from the Lower West Side of Manhattan across the Hudson River to the Jersey City rail station. They spotted Morello, Zaconi, #1 and close Morello associate Ignazio Lupo on the same ferry. The agents kept an eye on the Morello group. They noted that #1 carried a small dark valise with a black strap around its center. None of the others carried anything.

At about fifteen or twenty minutes after midnight, Morello and #1 exchanged kisses with Zaconi and Lupo and boarded the “Washington Express” train. At half past twelve, the train departed. Lupo and Zaconi traveled back to Manhattan on the Twenty-third Street Ferry.10

Arrival

In the early afternoon of Tuesday, November 3, 1903, Operative Patrick Looby in New Orleans received a garbled telegram from Acting Secret Service Chief William Herman Moran in Washington. He reported the contents of the telegram to his superiors and stated, “You will readily see that the above telegram is bulled.” Looby was able to ascertain that Morello and an associate were on their way to New Orleans and Operative Henry C. Dickey was being sent to the city from the Secret Service office in Memphis, Tennessee, in order to assist Looby in Morello-related surveillance.11

Agent Dickey arrived in New Orleans the next day. After showing him around the city locations where “strange Italians congregate,” Looby learned the expected arrival time of the train from New York and Washington.

Looby then managed to rearrange portions of the day-old telegram from Acting Chief Moran into a coherent message:

Guiesseppe Morrello, Italian, age forty, five feet eight, weight one hundred and sixty pounds, medium build, black hair and eyes, brown moustache, right hand deformed, dark clothes, black derby hat, plaid neck scarf. Accompanied by Italian, one hundred thirty five pounds, five feet seven, age forty five, dark clothes, striped blue and white shirt, soft brown hat, black tie, black moustache; left Washington enroute from New York to New Orleans this morning, eleven fifteen, southern. Suspect Morrello leader Italian band counterfeiters. He is taking plate, notes to New Orleans. Keep close watch on men while there. Tickets are return. Dickey has left, sent to assist you. Moran.12

Looby and Dickey went to the train station at nine-thirty Wednesday night. The train arrived at forty minutes after ten. The agents spotted Morello and his companion as they stepped off the train. Two other men greeted them and led them away. Looby and Dickey followed the group through back streets to the grocery-saloon of Salvatore “Joe” LoBiundo at 1217 Bienville Street.13

→ We previously discussed LoBiundo – whose name was also written “LoBondo” – in Part 3 and Part 5 of this series. By this time, the New York Secret Service had learned that LoBiundo was an active member of Morello’s Mafia in New Orleans and was in regular communication with Morello and Chicago boss Mariano Zagone. Secret Service Agent William Flynn was told that LoBiundo asked Zagone to murder a former LoBiundo underling who stole money and escaped to the Chicago area.14 ←

Looby reported that Morello’s companion carried “a black oil cloth cheap valise in his hand; this valise seemed heavy and was carried the entire distance by the same man – the fellow with the soft brown hat.” Morello and the others set themselves up in a private room adjoining the LoBiundo saloon and engaged in conversation.15

Surveillance

On Thursday, Looby and Dickey tried to keep their eyes on Morello and his companion in the area around 1217 Bienville. Both agents reported considerable difficulty.

In his report to superiors, Looby said, “I wish to call your attention to the fact that this is the hardest locality in the city of New Orleans to carry a shaddow to a successful issue; the entire neighborhood is given up to the red light district, filled with prostitutes, cheap saloons, and no suitable place for cover to keep under concealment.”16

Dickey provided a bit more detail in his report:

There is absolutely no place that we can take up the watch on this place and stay for any considerable length of time without attracting more or less attention. The houses are small, streets narrow, and the entire vicinity is seems to be occupied by prostitutes and cheap dago saloons, and, so far, we have been unable to secure a room which will give us a view of the entrance and exit of LoBondos saloon which appears to be the headquarters of Morrello and gang. About the best we can do, towards covering LoBondo’s place, is a long shaddow which of course is very unsatisfactory, but the place is so situated that it is folly to attempt to cover it at close range.17

As the agents attempted to watch and follow Morello associates on Friday, they found that they themselves were being followed. Concerned that he and Dickey had been identified as government agents, Looby decided to ask an African-American aide, Jim Gray, for assistance covering the visitors. Looby reported to superiors that he had known Gray for some time and had “a great deal of confidence” in him.18

Dickey seemed frustrated when he wrote his own report about activities of November 7 and wondered if Morello was still in the area:

I have been unable to see Morrello since the morning after his arrival at this place, and while it is true that LoBondo has lodgers in his house, or is prepared to keep them it is possible that Morello is still there.19

During their surveillance, the agents became intrigued by a man whose appearance differed from others in that he wore a Van Dyke beard. Gray followed the man in the early morning hours Saturday, as he moved from LoBiundo’s saloon to 910 Royal Street, where he opened the door with a key and went inside. The “man with the van dyke whiskers” was described in a Looby report written on Sunday, November 8:

Age about 50, height five feet 8 1/2; weight about 180, build heavy. Complexion, olive dark; eyes, black; color of hair, black; color of beard, black mixed with grey; style of beard, van-dyke. No scars or peculiarities visible.20

→ A Van Dyke beard, not at all popular in 1903, was a distinguishing feature belonging to mafioso Vito Cascioferro. Aside from that beard, the description provided by Looby is not an entirely comfortable fit for Cascioferro. In particular, Looby’s estimated age of the bearded man was about a decade greater than Cascioferro’s age at that time. (The Secret Service description of Giuseppe Morello added only about four years to his actual age.) The possibility that the Van Dyke-wearing man might have been Cascioferro remains interesting, as Cascioferro disappeared from New York City immediately after the April 1903 Barrel Murder. He reportedly spent time in New Orleans before returning to his native Sicily. Cascioferro was a suspect in the March 1909 Palermo assassination of visiting New York Police Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino. When arrested in connection with that killing, police reported found among Cascioferro’s papers a steamship ticket from New Orleans to Palermo that was dated September 29, 1904.21 ←

On Sunday, the agents observed LoBiundo preparing a banquet. Gray reported that several men not seen before had shown up. That night, the man with the Van Dyke beard was seen in the area, walking around the block containing the saloon.22

A man in a derby hat, who never removed his right hand from his coat pocket (and was presumed to be Morello), was seen in company with the Van Dyke-whiskered man and the companion with the soft brown hat as they rode in a wagon on Monday evening. The men climbed into the wagon at “P. Giacona’s place” at Dryades and Julia streets and traveled to Basin and Common streets. They stayed at that location for a while and then returned to LoBiundo’s establishment.

Looby instructed Gray to “remain all night if necessary but to not lose sight of the man with the derby hat.” In his report for the day, Looby stated, “I am now fully satisfied that there is something doing with these Italians.”23

Gray reported that he spotted the man with the derby hat and the one with the soft brown hat across Bienville Street from his own home on Monday. Gray had his wife strike up a conversation with the men. They all walked together to Bourbon Street and separated when the men entered a barbershop at 303 Bourbon Street. The men later returned to LoBiundo’s place.

They and the man with the Van Dyke were seen conversing together in the small room adjoining LoBiundo’s saloon later that night. The Van Dyke wearer left at about ten o’clock and returned to 910 Royal Street. The other two continued talking through midnight.24

All quiet

The Secret Service agents found little to do for several days after the late night conversation in LoBiundo’s back room. None of the surveillance targets appeared in the usual locations from Tuesday morning, November 10, until Saturday morning, November 14. On Saturday, Gray and Looby saw the Van Dyke-bearded man and a companion enter a macaroni factory at Ursulines and Chartres streets.

No activity was observed in the area of the LoBiundo saloon. Looby learned from a whiskey salesman that LoBiundo actually had sold his share in the saloon business to his partner, Joseph Barone. LoBiundo reportedly still ran a craps game upstairs over the business.25

After about another week of inactivity around 1217 Bienville Street, Looby returned to the location at seven o’clock Friday night, November 20, and saw a meeting taking place in the room adjoining the saloon. The agent reported that the Van Dyke-bearded man was there, along with five other men, having conversations. According to Looby, two of the men were wearing red handkerchiefs on their heads. He recognized one of those men as LoBiundo.

Looby did not speculate on the purpose of the meeting or the significance of the red headwear. He didn’t mention knots tied in the handkerchiefs.

He reported that the Van Dyke-bearded man and three others left the room at eight-twenty-five and went to the intersection of Canal and Bourbon streets. After a few minutes of conversation, they split up, with the Van Dyke-bearded man and a companion heading down Bourbon to Toulouse Street, where they boarded a streetcar.26

Giuseppe Morello was not spotted again. The last time agents felt certain they saw him in New Orleans was just after midnight on November 10, one week after his arrival in the city.

Story elements

The documented November 1903 trip to New Orleans contained many of the elements that later appeared in the published stories created by William Flynn (See Part 1).

It included a train trip closely monitored by Secret Service operatives, a greeting by Morello’s New Orleans allies at the train station and a conference with associates in the back room of a New Orleans “cafe.” There certainly were reasons to connect the journey to ongoing counterfeiting operations. (It is unlikely that any large amount of counterfeit currency was being transported within the single small valise carried by Morello’s traveling companion. The bag may have been large enough to accommodate small printing plates. It seems strange that the Secret Service did not make a greater effort to learn the contents of that valise.) And the red handkerchief headwear featured in Flynn’s stories made an appearance, though there were two wearers in the Secret Service reports and just one in Flynn’s published accounts.

It appeared to be a relatively quick trip, with Morello possibly staying just a week in New Orleans, though that was not as brief a stay as described in Flynn’s tales.

No murder linked to the New Orleans Sicilian underworld is known to have occurred during Morello’s stay in the city. The lack of a local gangland homicide conflicts with some of the Flynn published stories, which stated that a man who threatened to expose Morello’s counterfeiting racket to the authorities was killed during a Morello visit.

As we discussed, a Flynn article, published in April 1914, said the murder victim was a local hotel keeper who was shot through the heart. Another Flynn article, published just a couple of months later, stated that the man who threatened to inform on the counterfeiting operation was stabbed to death. Of course, both of those accounts disagreed with Flynn’s story in his 1919 book, The Barrel Mystery, which discussed a short Morello trip to New Orleans taken after the New York Barrel Murder. The book described a Morello meeting in a cafe back room, but made no mention of anyone being killed.

It is possible to resolve these conflicts if the timing of the violence against potential counterfeiting informants is expanded backward to include the New Orleans murders of the Luciano brothers before the Morello visit. Recall that Salvadore Luciano was killed (primarily stabbed) in June 1902 and Antonino Luciano was killed (shot) in August 1903. Since the brothers were connected with a rooming house business, they could fit a loose definition of the Flynn term, “hotel keeper.” Both brothers had feuded with close allies of Morello. Secret Service reports showed that Antonino knew of Morello counterfeiting and repeatedly discussed the operation with Secret Service agent Looby, making him a match for the man Flynn said threatened to expose Morello’s racket . If Salvadore had similar knowledge and threatened to reveal it, that could explain his fatal conflict with Morello allies.

But we may also find a possible reason for Flynn’s report of Morello-related violence by expanding the timeframe just slightly forward. Within a few weeks of the moment that Morello was last seen in New Orleans, underworld-linked macaroni manufacturer Giuseppe Impastato (discussed in Part 5) was murdered.

Impastato was shot to death on Sunday night, November 29, 1903. His body was found in the roadside gutter on Piety Street near Royal Street, a short distance from the river and about a mile and a half from his French Quarter home. He had been shot at close range in the head, face and body. A loaded .38-caliber revolver was found in his pants pocket.27

There were a number of possible suspects in the Impastato killing. Newspaper reports noted that Antonino Luciano had considered Impastato a secret enemy, suggesting that Impastato could have been killed to avenge the Lucianos. Impastato reportedly had sold his macaroni factory to a Joseph Testa in exchange for $1,300 to be paid over time. Though the deal was signed two months earlier, it was said that no payments had been made by the time of his murder. A quarrel over the debt also could have led to Impastato’s violent end.28

Morello associates may have been responsible. While Impastato may not have been considered a Morello mob informer, he could have been viewed as a potentially dangerous connection for Morello. Evidence of Morello communication with Impastato had been seized by law enforcement from Morello’s home at the time of the Barrel Murder. And a registered letter from Morello to Impastato in March 1903 was noted by New Orleans postal authorities and the Secret Service.29

Back in New York

After being subjected to the extended scrutiny of Secret Service agents, Morello managed to disappear for a while. He returned to New York City in advance of his December 7, 1903, wedding to Nicolina Salemi at the Church of St. Lucy in East Harlem, but escaped the notice of authorities.30

Early in 1904, agents in New York wondered if Morello had returned. On February 2, 1904, William Flynn instructed Special Operative John J. Henry and Special Operative John H. Helms to check around the usual East Harlem locations and learn if Morello was back.

At two o’clock that afternoon, Henry and Helms observed Morello standing in front of 337 East 106th Street, talking to two men. (That address had a long association with the Morello family and was given as Morello’s home address at the time of his 1900 arrest with Calogero Maggiore for counterfeiting.) The agents watched him walk along First Avenue to East 107th Street and then enter the basement at 306 East 107th.31

Some immediate effort was made to get the Morello counterfeiting investigation back on track. Agent Flynn attempted to use Henry “Dude” Thompson, recently freed after a prison sentence earned in the Maggiore-Morello counterfeiting case of 1900, to gain information. Thompson was in need of financial assistance, and Flynn promised him $10 if he could reconnect with Morello.32

Thompson made an effort. But he was quickly informed by mutual contacts that Morello refused to see him.33

It would be five and a half more years before the Secret Service could turn all of its careful surveillance of the Morello mob into a convincing counterfeiting case. The authorities arrested Morello and much of his organization in November of 1909. With the help of a man who had been engaged in the printing of Morello counterfeits in Ulster County, New York, convictions were secured on February 19, 1910, and Morello was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.34

Flynn’s stories about Morello, his Mafia organization and his adventures in New Orleans were generated and published several years after that.

Other articles in this series:

• Part 1. Flynn tells of New York Mafia boss visits to New Orleans

• Part 2. Antonino Luciano settles in NOLA, encounters Mafia obstacle

• Part 3. Lucianos pay steep price for opposing Crescent City Mafia

• Part 4. New York Mafia boss uses violence to keep gang in line

• Commentary. It’s complicated: issue arises from recent article

• Part 5. Was Secret Service attention a factor in Luciano’s murder?

A new issue of Informer for 2026 is currently under consideration. The issue most likely would focus on the organized crime history of Las Vegas, Nevada.

If you are interested in contributing an article to a Las Vegas-focused Informer issue (and can have an article completed by end of summer), let me know through an email to informerjournal@gmail.com. Please be specific about the article subject, the sources you intend to use and (if we haven’t already worked together) your own background, if any, in research and writing. I am especially interested in subjects that have been neglected or buried under myth/legend.

Thanks!

- T.

On January 21, 1903, Operative Patrick Looby of the U.S. Secret Service’s New Orleans office received an interesting letter from his boss, Chief John E. Wilkie. Wilkie advised Looby that New York Mafia boss Giuseppe Morello had been observed in possession of a card with contact information for “Lo Blundo, 1217 Bienville Street, New Orleans.”

According to Wilkie, Morello led a gang that was distributing counterfeit five-dollar notes. These bore markings of the National Iron Bank of Morristown, New Jersey, and were known as “the Morristown fives.”1

“Lo Blundo” may have been a remote Morello gang member or merely a conduit for information flowing between New York and New Orleans mafiosi.

Wilkie wasn’t clear on how the “Lo Blundo” card came to Secret Service attention. But there was good reason for heightened interest in the Morello operation. At the time, several Morello associates had recently been arrested for passing Morristown fives in Yonkers, New York. (See Part 4.)

Looby consulted with local postal officials and had them watch for any mail addressed to an occupant of 1217 Bienville Street with a name like “Lo Blundo.” (Looby initially settled on a spelling of “LaBiundo” and later mixed in a spelling of “LoBondo.” Looby often referred to him with the first name, “Joe.”) Looby regularly checked in at the post office for news on mail headed to that address. The following month, he also began checking for mail addressed to Francesco Genova of 521 Hospital Street, a leader in the local Mafia.2

→ Salvatore LoBiundo was a recent arrival from Palermo, Sicily, settling in New Orleans in 1901 and having his wife and their several children join him there a year later. He became the partner of Bartolo Ferrara in a 914 Julia Street business – likely the same sort of combined grocery and saloon that Antonino Luciano ran. The partnership was ended when Luciano fatally shot Ferrara on June 12, 1902, to avenge the earlier murder of his brother Salvadore Luciano. (See Part 3.) Then LoBiundo entered a partnership with Joseph Barone in a similar enterprise at 1217 Bienville Street, the location that was printed on the card found in Morello’s possession. That address sat a short distance outside the French Quarter, within the boundaries of the “Storyville” or “Tenderloin” section of New Orleans, where prostitution and gambling were officially tolerated.3 ←

Looby learned on February 23, 1903, that a letter had been sent from New York to the Bienville Street business address. The name of the intended recipient was written something like, “Geoviana Berione.” (Berione seemed an approximation of “Barone,” the name of LoBiundo’s partner. Looby’s reports contained numerous references to a Giovanni Barone.) The return address was 8 Prince Street in Manhattan, a building linked with a number of Morello gang members. Looby went along with the mail carrier as the letter was delivered and watched from a distance as LoBiundo came out, explained that Barone was not there, accepted the letter and signed for it.4

Washington higher-ups advised Looby in March that he should keep an eye on LoBiundo and Barone at 1217 Bienville Street and also Giuseppe Impastato of 610 Dumaine Street. He added Impastato’s address to his watch list and continued checking with postal officials. On March 21, he learned that a letter from Giuseppe Morello of 226 Elizabeth Street in New York City was on its way to Impastato.5

→ Giuseppe Impastato, born in November 1860, emigrated from Sicily to the U.S. in 1886. He was among the many Italian Americans arrested following the 1890 Mafia assassination of Police Chief David Hennessy. He was not charged in that case but was tried and acquitted at that time for carrying a loaded revolver. In 1900, he lived and worked at 610-612 Dumaine, near Chartres Street, with his wife and their children. His dough-related surname was appropriate to his legitimate line of work: he was a macaroni maker. The Dumaine Street location remained the site of his macaroni business even after Impastato moved his residence a short distance around the corner to 819 Chartres Street in the early 1900s. Impastato was not known to be involved in the feud with Antonino Luciano, but Luciano let authorities know that he considered Impastato a secret enemy.6 ←

A mid-April telegram from Washington to Looby announced: “Morello arrested in New York in connection with Mystery here.” That “mystery” was the infamous “Barrel Murder” of Benedetto Madonia, and Morello was just one of about a dozen suspects in the case. (See Part 4.) The telegram went on to say that Morello had corresponded with several New Orleanians, including Impastato of 610 Dumaine Street, Vincenzo Alessio and Santo Calamia. Looby was instructed to arrange the arrests of those individuals and to check their papers for letters from Morello.7

Antonino Luciano had already been acquitted of the Bartolo Ferrara murder by that time and had returned to his business at Gravier and Saratoga streets, across from the block containing the parish prison, police station and criminal courthouse.

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Looby indicated in his reports that he had little information on Impastato, Alessio and Calamia. Looby’s aide Gaetano Russo told Looby that he had never heard of Alessio or Calamia and was not personally acquainted with Impastato. Both Looby and Russo really should at least have been aware that Calamia – referred to in the press as Joseph Calamia – had been personally involved in the feud with Luciano and had been acquitted early in that year of the murder of Luciano’s brother Salvadore.

A separate bit of information might have called to mind the fairly recent violence of the New Orleans Mafia’s feud with Luciano. That was a sensational news item that appeared in papers across the country on April 30 and May 1, 1903. The article referred to an alleged confession made by Joseph DiPrima when he was brought from Sing Sing Prison to Manhattan to testify in the coroner’s inquest into the Barrel Murder killing of Benedetto Madonia.

In a statement made to Assistant District Attorney Francis P. Garvan, DiPrima reportedly said the New York-based Mafia was responsible for the Barrel Murder and was also responsible for killing an underworld associate in New Orleans, who had been accused of skimming proceeds from its counterfeiting operations in that city. “He [the associate] denied it and after some time became ugly,” DiPrima reportedly said. “He was warned that he had better be careful, but he defied the order and one day his dead body was found in the street. No one was ever prosecuted for the crime.”8

While the details of this account were not a precise match, an investigator looking specifically into New York–New Orleans underworld connections would have been excused for thinking it might refer to the unexplained, dramatic but ineffective attack by Salvadore Luciano against Mafia leaders, the unheeded warnings to Salvadore to leave the city and the subsequent murder of Salvadore.

New Orleans police detectives approached Looby in May 1903 with information about counterfeit currency being shipped to New Orleans from New York. On May 25, 1903, Detective James Rainey introduced Secret Service Operative Looby to Antonino Luciano, who was running a store from his home at 240 Saratoga Street at the intersection with Gravier. Looby, in his report about the meeting, said Luciano told him that “Joe Bastato and Sando Shorie, macaroni dealers, Dumaine and Chartres st.” were receiving counterfeit coins from New York and that a Francesco Paulo Governale was distributing the phony currency. The name “Bastato” turned out to be a dead end for Looby. He seemed not to consider that this might have been Impastato, proprietor of a macaroni business on Dumaine Street, whose name had already appeared in Looby reports dozens of times.

During this meeting, Antonino Luciano went on to discuss Giuseppe Morello. He told the secret service agent that Morello was in prison in New York. (A coroner’s jury had recently named Morello and six of his associates as accessories to the Barrel Murder.) Luciano said Morello’s brother and brother-in-law were making counterfeit coins and selling them through New Orleans associates in order to raise money “to help Morello out of trouble.” Luciano said a new batch of coins was to arrive in New Orleans soon, and he promised to advise Looby when they came in.9

These mentions of coins suggest that Luciano was not very closely tied into the Morello organization at the time. The gang by then was circulating counterfeit paper bills, the Morristown fives. While Luciano fumbled a bit on the “what” of that criminal activity, he seemed to have a good grasp on the “who,” “where,” “when” and “why.”

So, at the precise moment when New York Mafia boss Giuseppe Morello was most concerned with informants in his organization, and apparently had conspired in the murders of at least two men he felt he could not trust, Antonino Luciano stepped forward to become an informant for the U.S. Secret Service. And he appeared to have insider knowledge about Morello activities, obtained either on his own or through a connection into the Morello mob.

Looby seemed to make an effort to learn about the Bastato, Shorie and Governale mentioned by Luciano. In the meantime, he kept in touch with Luciano, visiting him at his home and business on June 1, June 8, June 15, June 22 and June 23. Through all those visits, he obtained one bit of new information: Luciano said that a friend had informed him that the next expected batch of counterfeit currency was due to arrive in New Orleans by June 26.10

Curiously, the Secret Service agent seems not to have visited Luciano on the twenty-sixth or at any time after that. Luciano’s name did not appear in Looby’s later reports. It appears that Looby cut off communication with Luciano. One possible motivation for doing so might have been that his visits had been discovered by someone among the suspected counterfeiters. (That is one of the more generous of the possibilities.) In that summer of 1903, Luciano began spending a lot of time with a new friend, Sam Aspara. In early August, friend Aspara followed Luciano into a dark stairwell and shot him to death from behind. (See Part 3.)

Looby must have noticed the published articles about the murder of his former informant Luciano (and about subsequent proceedings that resulted in a death sentence against Aspara). Still, Luciano did not merit a mention in his reports. Like his New York colleague William J. Flynn, whose playacting in an effort to secure the cooperation of Isidore Crocevera likely led to the murder of “Barrel” victim Benedetto Madonia, Looby through his repeated visits may have had some responsibility for the violent end of Luciano.

→ Patrick Austin Looby was born about 1846 in Ireland. His parents, Edward and Sarah Looby, brought him to the United States three years later. Settling in New Orleans, Edward did a profitable business as a money lender. Young Patrick worked for a time as a clerk in his father’s business and then moved into law enforcement and became active in Democratic politics. He reportedly served as a city police detective and became a deputy criminal sheriff for Orleans Parish.11 ←

→ Looby twice found himself momentarily on the wrong side of the law. He was arrested in April 1862, when as a teenager he was accused of stealing a $20 bill. His second arrest occurred more than forty-five years later. He and two other men apparently were arrested on Basin Street at two o’clock in the morning for disturbing the peace. Both times, he was quickly discharged.12 ←

→ Growing up around money, Looby developed a knack for spotting counterfeit currency. He was first appointed to head the Southern District (New Orleans office) of the U.S. Secret Service by President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, in 1884. When President Cleveland was voted out of office in favor of Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888, Looby resigned his post. (Note: The Secret Service of the period was not tasked with protecting the President and did not possess its later reputation for political neutrality. Both became features of Secret Service work following the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley.) During Harrison’s four-year term, Looby was engaged as a harbor master and as a member of the state board of flour inspectors. When Grover Cleveland returned to the White House in 1893, Looby was reappointed to the Secret Service.13 ←

→ He oversaw the Secret Service office, located within the New Orleans Custom House, at least until 1920. The U.S. Census of 1920 found him a solitary boarder, sixty-nine years old, at 1024 Philip Street.14 ←

→ In his early seventies, he married for the first and only time, taking Catherine McAuley as his bride in May of 1922. The couple moved into a private home at 3613 Napoleon Avenue. Looby lived only sixteen months longer. He died at his residence on September 2, 1923. He was survived only by his wife. Looby left a substantial estate, including thousands of dollars in cash, along with stocks, bonds and some real estate in Jefferson Parish.15 ←

Given the data contained in the reports of Operative Patrick A. Looby, it appears that Antonino Luciano either was part of the extended Morello Mafia organization or had connections within that mob. One possible connection was Antonino’s brother Salvadore, who somewhat fits the description of a Morello counterfeiting racket associate who was branded a cheat, was warned and was then murdered. But Salvadore’s murder, occurring a year before Antonino spoke with law enforcement, rules him out as the source of the information Antonino supplied to Looby.

Antonino Luciano volunteered to inform on the Morello counterfeiting operation just as Morello was violently lashing out at suspected informers. It is concerning that Looby visited Luciano so often – five times in a period of about three weeks – and then suddenly broke off communication just as the murder of Luciano was being set up.

In the sixth and final part of this series, Secret Service agents document in some detail an autumn 1903 visit of Giuseppe Morello to the Crescent City. Turn now to Part 6.

You should recall that Petto was among the many New York Mafia suspects gathered up following the April 14, 1903, discovery of gangland murder victim Benedetto Madonia in a barrel left on a Manhattan street. Petto, said to be in possession of a pawn ticket for the murdered man’s watch, was the only one of the group who was indicted for the murder. He was held in custody for months but never tried. In January 1904, he was set free.

An April 25, 1903, daily report by William Flynn of the Secret Service, which was cited as a source in the article, stated that the incriminating pawn ticket for the watch was found in the personal papers police took from Petto. My use of this straightforward source was basically a means of dodging messy issues relating to the Petto identification, which were quite far removed from the article subject.

A more complete discussion would have acknowledged that Flynn was not personally present when the papers were acquired by NYPD detectives, and he could not have known, independent of detective statements, whether the papers and the pawn ticket actually came from Petto.

Other accounts, including a statement by New York County District Attorney William Travers Jerome, revealed that there was some early doubt about the identification of Petto. This doubt grew from the suggestion that another suspect, Giovanni Pecoraro, reportedly had been in holding (for some reason) a pistol permit made out for Petto when he was arrested. That may have led to Pecoraro being mistakenly identified as Petto, at least in the early going.

→ Adding to the uncertainties, the statement by D.A. Jerome, which was paraphrased in the April 30, 1903, New York Tribune, included the assertion that the real Tommaso Petto had not been arrested at all. This was contrary to all other reporting. We should probably consider that Jerome was not personally handling the case and may not have been in command of its details. The “Barrel Murder” case was momentarily under the control of Assistant District Attorney Francis Patrick Garvan, who led the New York County D.A.’s homicide bureau. For some reason, the case was taken over by Assistant District Attorney James R. Ely by January 1904, and it was Ely who decided that it was insufficient for trial. Garvan later became a top assistant in the U.S. Justice Department and distinguished himself in the prosecutions of U.S. political radicals - those swept up in the “Palmer Raids” of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Garvan also was responsible for setting young J. Edgar Hoover to the job of gathering intelligence against domestic radical elements. ←

We might expect that any identification wrinkles were ironed out of the case before it was brought before the grand jury. The grand jury seemed to have no concerns finding its focus when, on June 25, it indicted just Petto for the murder.

But, clearly, some problems remained in the murder case against Petto. Possibly, prosecutors had steered around the identification question (as I tried to in the recent article) when they were in front of the grand jury, where there is a lower standard of proof and there is no opportunity for cross-examination, but had little confidence of being able to perform the same song and dance during a criminal trial.

Tony Bombassolo did not say so, but I suspect that my side-note speculation in the article made the Petto-Pecoraro confusion more of an issue than it would have been otherwise. (I was concerned about making the speculation, but I could not resist.) Recall, that I suggested the list of possible suspects in the autumn 1905 murder of Petto may have included “an underworld superior who faulted him for the indiscretion of pawning a murder victim’s watch and retaining the pawn ticket.”

Certainly, if the pawn ticket actually had been obtained from Pecoraro, who had been identified only through error as Petto, the underworld superior would not have faulted Petto at all.

Someday someone may be able to straighten all of this out.

There are many questions: Did the watch pawn ticket come from Petto or Pecoraro or possibly someone else? Might the murder suspects just have been trying to confuse their captors or was it true that Pecoraro personally possessed Petto’s pistol permit? (Try that one five times fast.) What parts of D.A. Jerome’s statement, if any, were reliable? Did the grand jury indict Petto by mistake? What specifically caused the D.A.’s office to give up on bringing Petto to trial?

Sorry. No answers here. Just an 800-plus-word way of saying, “I don’t know.”

Desperate to preserve secrecy

During this period, New York-based Mafia leader Giuseppe Morello was working somewhat frantically to preserve the secrecy of his underworld operations, particularly his ongoing counterfeiting rackets. The chore quickly became a bloody one.

Morello’s concerns about secrecy were likely heightened by his involvement in a counterfeiting case in June 1900. Morello and his pal Calogero Maggiore (sometimes spelled “Meggiore,” this Morello colleague had been a resident of New Orleans before settling in New York), both said to be residents of 337 East 106th Street in East Harlem, were named as leading figures and “wholesalers” in a ring that had been circulating phony five-dollar bills.

Other suspected members of the ring included non-Italians Henry “Dude” Thompson, William Green, James Whalen, John Gleason and Margaret Callahan. When the case came to trial, Gleason turned state’s evidence and helped secure the convictions of Maggiore, Thompson, Whalen and Green. Meggiore was sent to Sing Sing Prison for a six-year term. Thompson and Whalen were sentenced to five years. Green got a three-year term in the Elmira Reformatory. Evidence was lacking against Morello and Callahan, and they were released.1

The Mafia chief confronted a dire security issue in the summer of 1902. A Brooklyn-based colleague known as “Joe the Grocer” – Joe was connected to a variety of different surnames, including Catania, Caldani, Carus or Caruso, DiTrapani and Crotanno – was found to be speaking imprudently whenever he drank. As he had personal knowledge of the rackets and activities of the Mafia units in and around New York City, he was a serious risk. An incautious remark could expose Morello and others to time in prison or worse.2

At about the same time that Salvadore Luciano, Vincenzo Vutera, Bartolo Ferrara and Joseph Geraci lost their lives in the New Orleans feud, Giuseppe Morello was reportedly conferring with other underworld leaders in New York City, including Domenico Pecoraro and Giuseppe Trovato, about their “Joe the Grocer” problem. A consensus was quickly reached.

On July 23, 1902, Joe was found dead inside a large burlap potato sack dropped near the shore in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The cause of death was clear. His throat had been deeply cut from ear to ear, nearly separating his head from his body. Other knife wounds were evident.3

At the end of that year, while prosecutors in New Orleans were waiting for Antonio Luciano to recover his senses so they could proceed with the murder trial of Santo Calamia (who, by the way, was a relative through marriage of the Morello clan in New York), another security problem arose in Westchester County, New York. On New Year’s Eve, 1902, members of the Morello counterfeiting operation were caught passing phony bills in the city of Yonkers, just north of the Bronx.4

Counterfeiting arrests

Joseph DiPrima, Isidore Crocevera and Salvatore Romano were arrested by local police. A fourth man, believed to be higher up in the operation, was observed but managed to escape. The case against the counterfeiters was investigated by William J. Flynn, top agent of the Secret Service office in New York City. Flynn and his men already had some information on the suspects, having covertly followed Morello and his associates for some time. Through lengthy and ongoing surveillance at a level unimagined by underworld leaders, the Secret Service was building hefty and detailed files on New York-area mafiosi. Flynn matched the description of the escaped fourth suspect to a man his office had referred to in its reports as “#6.”5

Flynn hoped to convince the suspects to cooperate in his investigation. In an effort to persuade Crocevera, he had Crocevera and DiPrima brought before him at the same time. He was deliberately tough in his conversation with Crocevera, but he spoke and acted in a friendly manner toward DiPrima. In this way, he hoped to convince Crocevera that DiPrima was already cooperating and benefiting from doing so, and that Crocevera might as well tell what he knew of the operation.

Flynn was only partly successful. Crocevera apparently did decide that DiPrima was giving information to the Secret Service, but he did not decide to become an informant himself.6

When Secret Service agents located #6, identified him as Giuseppe Giallombardo and arrested him for counterfeiting, Crocevera interpreted that as further evidence that someone – most likely DiPrima – was selling out the counterfeiting ring. Flynn later recalled that Crocevera spoke of the apparent betrayal to other prisoners. Flynn suspected that the story got to Mafia bosses, who decided that DiPrima must be punished for the sake of underworld discipline. The four defendants were indicted February 27, 1903, for passing counterfeit currency.7

The case came to trial in Manhattan Federal Court on March 12, 1903. With insufficient evidence introduced against Salvatore Romano, the indictment against him was dismissed, and he was discharged. The jury on March 13 convicted Giallombardo, DiPrima and Crocevera of counterfeiting. Sentencing was scheduled for the seventeenth. (That turned out to be one day after Antonino Luciano in New Orleans suffered the loss of his fifteen-week-old daughter.) The judge sentenced Giallombardo to five years in prison. DiPrima and Crocevera were sentenced to four years and three years, respectively. Each of the defendants also was assessed a $1 fine.8

The punishments handed out by the court did not support the suspicion that DiPrima had cooperated. No reward was evident. His prison term was less than Giallombardo’s but more than the reportedly uncooperative Crocevera’s. Morello’s DiPrima-related concerns might have dissipated over time, but something else happened: A DiPrima relative from Buffalo, New York, made angry accusations against Morello and suddenly showed up in Manhattan issuing demands.

Man in the barrel

Secret Service agents were watching as mafiosi, including Giuseppe Morello and Vito Cascioferro, met on the night of April 13, 1903, with someone the agents had not seen before. When the body of a Italian man – stabbed repeatedly and killed by the deep stroke of a blade across his throat – turned up in a barrel on a Manhattan walkway the next morning, the Secret Service identified the victim as the newcomer.9

That the murdered man had been seen just hours earlier in the presence of mafiosi, caused the police to round up Morello and much of his gang. About a dozen men were arrested on April 15 and 16. One noteworthy Morello associate who escaped arrest was Vito Cascioferro.

→ Cascioferro was easily detected by his curled mustache and Van Dyke beard – distinguished looking, but not at all fashionable for the era. The Secret Service heard in spring 1904 that Cascioferro had escaped back to Sicily after traveling to New Orleans. It seems that report was a little early and that he was still in New Orleans until early fall 1904. ←

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Newspaper reports, likely benefiting from information provided by the Secret Service, linked the Morello organization to the Barrel Murder, to the earlier killing of Joe the Grocer and to counterfeiting operations in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, New Orleans and other cities.10

New York Police Detective Joseph Petrosino established the identity of the Barrel Murder victim after traveling to Sing Sing Prison to question Joseph DiPrima, who recognized a photograph of the victim, and traveling to Buffalo to meet with DiPrima relatives. The dead man was found to be Benedetto Madonia, brother-in-law of the imprisoned counterfeiter and another member of the Morello counterfeiting operation.11

During a coroner’s inquest in May, some of the suspects lied about being acquainted with Madonia. Morello himself tried to deny a relationship with the Barrel victim but was confronted with a letter from Madonia that was found in his possession. Another letter was also read into the record of the inquest. Sent by Francesco Genova of New Orleans (the Mafia leader whose assassination had been attempted by Salvadore Luciano in May 1902), it warned Morello of “false friends who are the ruin of the good ones,” and promised obedience to Morello’s orders.12

As the inquest concluded, police detectives added another suspect to the already long list. He was Giovanni Zarcone, a Brooklyn resident and an owner of a Stanton Street butcher shop in which Mafia leaders had been seen meeting with Benedetto Madonia. Though the inquest showed that the suspects had been with the victim before the murder and that some of them had lied about connections to him, there was no direct evidence that any had been involved in killing him. The jury decided that the murder was committed by some person or persons unknown, but it called for seven men to be held as accessories, including Morello, Zarcone and Tommaso Petto, who had been found in possession of a pawn ticket for a watch apparently taken from Madonia.13

The seven were held at the Tombs Prison until a Manhattan grand jury on June 25 indicted Petto alone for the murder of Madonia and indicted Antonio Genova and Giuseppe Fanaro for perjury.

→ Tommaso Petto never came to trial. He was released from the Tombs at the end of January 1904. He was followed for a time by Secret Service agents. By spring of 1905, he was a resident of northeastern Pennsylvania, known there as Luciano Parrino. He was murdered outside his home near Browntown, Pittston Township, on Saturday night, Oct. 21, 1905. There reportedly were many who had motives to kill him. One was certainly Joseph DiPrima, who, depending on the source, may or may not have won parole in time to accomplish it. Perhaps another was an underworld superior who faulted him for the indiscretion of pawning a murder victim’s watch and retaining the pawn ticket. (For more about this matter, see “It’s complicated: issue arises from recent article.”) ←

The summer 1903 indictments were returned at about the same time that Sam Asparo was becoming friendly with Antonino Luciano in New Orleans and just about a month and a half before Asparo fatally shot Luciano.14

Conclusion

Giuseppe Morello was clearly concerned about the discipline of his organization, as he had repeatedly come close to imprisonment. He had seen (or at least thought he had seen, as DiPrima hadn’t actually talked, but it seemed that he had) two cases – in 1900 and 1903 – in which talkative colleagues caused others to be sent to prison. He took action in 1902 against a Brooklyn blabbermouth. And he responded in decisive fashion the following year to the double-threat of DiPrima’s perceived garrulousness and Madonia’s rebelliousness.

Some of Morello’s connections to the underworld of New Orleans have been noted. But, so far, the connections seem flimsy: He corresponded with the New Orleans Mafia boss who was shot at by Salvadore Luciano, and he was distantly related to the mafioso who subsequently helped murder Salvadore Luciano.

To argue that Giuseppe Morello was in any way linked to the New Orleans feud that was so costly to the Luciano family, we really need something more. The work of U.S. Secret Service agents may provide us just enough.

In Part 5, we will look at what the agents had to say about Morello, Luciano and events in New Orleans. Turn to Part 5.

(Underlined sources in the endnotes below are clickable links. Asterisks mark Amazon affiliate links provided for books available for purchase through that seller. )