While the public argument may go on about whether the Mafia exists or if organized crime has divvied up the country, the question of territory is always settled firmly and forcibly when outsiders try to muscle in on a crime family’s domain.
In some two dozen–odd cities around the country, certain crime families are, by common consent, recognized as being preeminent. As such they must police their own areas and guarantee, with violence if necessary, to repel invaders. All the national syndicate or the ruling commission will do is, perhaps, order the intruder out to prevent a bloody war over what is regarded as a “closed territory.”
However, certain areas—too lush and profitable to be controlled by a single family and thus constantly subjected to incursions—have had to be declared “open territories,” available for plucking by any family with the know-how and the will to mine its riches. If Las Vegas had not been declared open territory, it would doubtlessly look today like Dresden after World War II. No single family would ever have the strength and, equally important, the financial and political muscle needed to fight off the other crime families angling for a stake in legal gambling.
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There are today at least two other open territories. One is the Miami area of Florida, partly under the influence of the new “Cuban Mafia,” but really still a syndicate stronghold. In the 1930s, the mobs declared Miami and its surroundings “open” when an overly ambitious New York mobster, Little Augie Pisano, fostered the illusion he could take over the town and start his own crime family there.
Unfortunately for Pisano, an oldtime Lower East Side gunman, crime genius Meyer Lansky, was already ensconced in Hallandale, where he operated the fantastically profitable Colonial Inn, invested in dog racing and gained control of a bookmaker wire. For a time, Lansky tolerated Pisano’s presence, and they shared Florida’s East Coast gambling rackets. But finally Lansky demanded that the commission declare Miami and Miami Beach open territories.
Pisano screamed, but Lansky, predictably, won out. Efficient exploitation of the Miami market required more finesse than Pisano could hope to possess. Even the Trafficante family of Tampa did not try to swallow Miami whole, realizing the task of fighting Lansky, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and several other families from points north would be impossible.
The other notable open territory is California. While the police in that state often speak disparagingly of the local crime families and call them the “Mickey Mouse Mafia,” the state is hardly free of important organized crime forces. Chicago has always been involved in Hollywood, everything from shakedown rackets and labor extortion, to promoting an acting career now and then, to even producing some B-movies. And Meyer Lansky sent in Bugsy Siegel to mine what he knew to be enormous, unexplored gambling opportunities. When Siegel got there, he rumpled the feathers of L.A. crime boss Jack Dragna, one of the few toughs on the local scene.
Anticipating complications, Lansky visited Lucky Luciano, then incarcerated in Dannemora prison, and got him to agree that California was so big and wide open that everybody had to be allowed in. Luciano sent an edict to Dragna “requesting” his “full cooperation” with Siegel, who was “coming West for the good of his health and the health of all of us.” In such diplomatic language are open territories made.
One crime area that never became open territory was Havana, Cuba, during the reign of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Lansky had its vice operations especially its casino trade, sewed up tight. When the Trafficante forces from Florida tried to muscle in, he had Batista inform them: “You have to get approval from the ‘Little Man’ [Lansky] before you can get a license on this island.”
Of course, Lansky did not try to swallow all the profits himself, knowing he too would then have to battle all the crime families, and he set about putting several underworld powers in his debt. He turned around and gave Trafficante a piece, and he cut in the Chicago people as well and Moe Dalitz and certain other Cleveland mafiosi.
One he refused to allow in, probably as much for personal reasons as any other, was Albert Anastasia who in the late 1950s moved aggressively, trying to get in after Lansky turned him down. Anastasia kept pressing, trying to work through some local Cuban businessmen and with Trafficante, who must have informed Lansky.
Lansky, in the meantime, learned of a Vito Genovese–Carlo Gambino plot to kill Anastasia, and he immediately sent word he would support the hit, even though on a personal level he hated the anti- Semitic Genovese far more than Anastasia. But Genovese had no designs on Cuba, and the shining principle of territorial integrity won out yet again when Anastasia was killed.
Atlantic City, the newe legalized there, Angelo Bruno, the Philadelphia crime boss, felt it should remain part of his domain. The other crime families had had little interest in impoverished Atlantic City and its numbers rackets, but casino gambling was a new ballgame. Bruno proved stubborn and was promptly assassinated.
According to knowledgeable sources, the Gambino family from New York moved in. Others followed. Over the next decade or so Atlantic City will become totally open or it will, as one investigator put it, become known as “the city of corpses by the seashore.”
