In his day, Willie Moretti was a tough enforcer and syndicate boss, a power in New Jersey rackets to whom extortion, dope pushing and murder were part of the normal way of doing business. By the time he died in what the mob regarded as a “mercy killing,” he was a clown, the comic relief at the Kefauver hearings, and a real threat to the mob with his loose lip. That was to prove to be the end of tough Willie Moore, as he was sometimes known.
A boyhood friend of Frank Costello, Moretti was in his younger days as rough and ready as any gangster. In New Jersey, he bossed an enforcer troop of about 60 gunmen, who protected his longtime partner, Longy Zwillman, and his own racket interests. The racket interests were extensive, often intermingled with the New York interests of Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis and others.
New York Times crime reporter Meyer Berger once observed, “the Morettis had their bookmaking agents among workers in the major factories in Bergen, they shared the bookmaking profits pouring into the New York mob’s astonishingly widespread New Jersey wire system, and they were partners in plush casinos and so-called ‘sawdust,’ or dice barns deep into Pennsylvania.”
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Their top casino in Bergen was the Marine Room in the famed Riviera nightclub, located just north of the George Washington Bridge on the Palisades. The Riviera was a nightclub with top entertainers. The floor show was open to the public; getting into the gambling room was another matter. All the players had to be known or they had to stay in the dining rooms and watch the show.
Moretti was known within the underworld as singer Frank Sinatra’s original godfather. They had become fast friends when the singer from Hoboken was performing for peanuts in local roadhouses and clubs. In 1939, Sinatra, while singing with Harry James’s orchestra, made his first hit recording, “All or Nothing at All.”
Band leader Tommy Dorsey signed him for what Sinatra must have regarded as a princely sum, $125 a week. Sinatra’s popularity was soaring thanks to the bobbysoxers who followed him everywhere. But he was locked in by his contract to Tommy Dorsey. The much-repeated underworld tale of what happened is this: One night Willie Moretti showed up at Dorsey’s dressing room and stuck a gun into the band leader’s mouth. Moretti then suggested that Dorsey might sell Sinatra’s contract. The price agreed on was one dollar.
A few years after that Moretti started acting funny at times, showing the first signs of mental illness brought on by the ravages of untreated syphilis. Moretti loved to gamble and claimed to be winning bets on horses for millions of dollars. He tried to place bets on horses and races that didn’t exist. He even started at times to talk about syndicate affairs, matters that were not to be mentioned in public. Eventually quite a few capos loyal to Costello began saying Willie was a threat to everyone.
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| Murder of Willie Moretti |
Costello had been best man at Willie’s wedding and held him in high affection. Costello decided the best thing to do with Moretti was to get him out of the line of fire, sending him for a long vacation out West with a male nurse. Moretti frequently telephoned Costello, in conversations wiretapped by the police, begging to be allowed to come back. Costello refused and went on protecting Willie from himself. Only when Moretti became less voluble was he allowed to return.
When Moretti was called before the Kefauver committee, many mobsters wanted him knocked off, even though he had been behaving better. Costello again prevented it, and after much stalling Moretti finally appeared before the Senate committee. He proceeded to talk and talk and talk, though he said very little.
No, he explained, he was not a member of the Mafia because he didn’t have a membership card. And he offered such pearls of wisdom as “They call anybody a mob who makes six percent more on money”; and concerning gangsters he knew: “wellcharactered people don’t need introductions.” When Moretti left the stand, the committee members seemed satisfied. Senator Estes Kefauver thanked him for his forthrightness, and Senator Charles Tobey found his frankness “rather refreshing.”
“Thank you very much,” Willie replied to the praise. “Don’t forget my house in Deal if you are down on the shore. You are invited.”
The mob was quite pleased with how Moretti had handled himself on the witness stand, but Willie started to deteriorate in late 1951. He talked regularly to New Jersey newspapermen and made noise about holding a press conference to review gambling in New Jersey. Vito Genovese, a Costello enemy, began strong lobbying for Moretti’s execution.
Genovese knew that if he could get rid of Moretti he could move his own men into Willie’s operations and further erode the power of Costello. Moretti, Genovese said, was losing his mind, and the entire organization could be in trouble. “If tomorrow I go wrong, I want you to hit me in the head too,” Genovese said. Finally even such a staunch ally as Albert Anastasia was convinced that a “mercy killing” was necessary for the sake of both Willie and the syndicate.
On October 4, 1951, Willie sat down in a New Jersey restaurant with three or four men (the testimony varies on this). When the waitress stepped into the kitchen, they were chatting amiably in Italian. Suddenly there were several gunshots and when the waitress peered through the kitchen door, all the customers except one were gone.
Fifty-seven-year-old Willie Moretti lay dead on the floor, his left hand on his chest. It was a typical mob rubout, and there would be no convictions. Willie had been shot up front, supposedly a mark of “respect” accorded to bosses. They had a right to see what was happening.
In this case it could well have been a sign of respect since, after all, everybody genuinely liked Willie. They just happened to like him better dead.
