Mafia Stories

Spending Habits of Mafiosi

They talk big, they act big and above all they spend big. When it comes to spending nobody can match mafiosi.

The stories are legion about Al Capone buying all of a newsboy's papers and sending him home with a $20, or $50 bill, or tipping a waitress $100 for a cup of coffee. Since then, mafiosi big and small have tried to live up to Capone's standards.

It is a matter not merely of imitation, but rather of behavior that goes with the territory. Mafiosi live a life that demands "respect," but such respect often can only be measured in money, and thus it is natural for them to live high and spend big. To them it means having "class." Once Carmine "the Snake" Persico, a power in Brooklyn, handed a waiter $50 in payment for a check that came to something like $5.

"I'll have to get your change, sir," the waiter, looking at the denomination, said.

"Did I ask for change?" Persico asked, in a tone somewhere between magnanimity and annoyance.

Mobsters are notorious overtippers. As a rule, informer Vinnie Teresa said, mobsters give at least 25 or 30 percent as a tip. Henry Tamelo, the underboss of the New England mob, who later went to the death house on murder charges, gave 50 percent. "When he walked into a club, the waiters were busy throwing customers out of a booth to find him a seat."

Teresa explained why mobsters liked to dress up in $500 silk suits, $100-plus shoes, travel in luxurious cars, and parade into fancy places with beautiful women on their arms. "Ninety percent of all mob guys come from poverty. They grew up with holes in their pants, no shoes on their feet. They had rats in their rooms and they had to fight for a scrap of bread to eat. Now they made it."

Some mobsters would wonder what their lives were all about if they could not be ostentatious. No one could convince Chicago crime boss Tony Accardo to live in anything less than a 22-room mansion that sported an indoor pool, two bowling alleys and a pipe organ. The bathroom fixtures, all goldplated, were valued at a half million dollars.

On the other hand crime boss Joe Colombo's platinum-blonde wife never overdressed. As a sympathetic friend once remarked: "Poor Lucille has to walk around in rags because of those IRS jerks." Colombo learned that bit of personal restraint from his predecessor, Joe Profaci, who was known to his underlings as a man of exceedingly "short arms"— not the sort to part easily with a buck. Waiters were lucky to get 10 percent from Profaci, but, on the other hand, he gave a fortune to the collection plate of the Catholic Church.

So too did Chicago's psychopathic Sam Giancana, who was never known to put less than several hundred dollars in the envelope at mass. Giancana was not so stupid as to think he was buying himself absolution. He did it for his very devout wife. When his wife died, he donated a communion rail for St. Bernardine Church in Forest Park, Illinois, in her memory. It cost, the FBI reported, $13,000.

One reason mobsters spend so much, Teresa reported, was that they figure the money will keep coming. Teresa himself made something like $10 million in a 28-year crime career, but also spent "all I made like there was no tomorrow."

At the top of the crime ladder a surprising number of bigwigs feel no compulsion to spend big, feeling they have no need to prove themselves to others or even to themselves any more. Lucky Luciano dropped the loud dress, which marked, for example, members of Chicago's Capone Mob, in favor of the refined attire of a gentleman. It was no easy task. His mentor Arnold Rothstein once told him, "I want you to wear something conservative and elegant, made by a genteel tailor."

Luciano was taken aback. "What the hell are you talkin' about?" he replied. "My tailor's a Catholic."

Rothstein curbed Luciano's extravagant spending habits as well, explaining to him that the very rich don't overspend and overtip to get respect. A wageearner group ever after disappointed with Luciano's spending style was Polly Adler's hookers.

If a prostitute thought her sojourn to the Waldorf Towers for a session with Luciano was going to pay her much more than the then going rate of $20, she was sadly disappointed. At most Lucky would slip a $5 bonus in her brassiere as she dressed. "I didn't want to do nothin' different," he said. "What do you think I was gonna do—spoil it for everybody?"

Meyer Lansky would have been hard to spot as an organized crime big spender. Before his flight to Israel, home for Lansky was a modest three-bedroom ranchstyle house in Hallandale, Florida. He walked the family dog (described by some biographers as the ugliest dog in captivity), rented Chevrolets and spent most nights at home with his wife.

He never flaunted his wealth, estimated to be as much as $400 million, because he always thought back to his associates who did—Luciano, Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, Louis Lepke, Joey Adonis, Bugsy Siegel, Mickey Cohen and Albert Anastasia—and observed they all wound up imprisoned, deposed, deported, executed or assassinated. Lansky could be a handsome tipper however, at least when dining alone or with friends. Whenever he dined with his wife, he was careful to keep his tipping moderate.

Probably the greatest joy for a mob spender occurs on a visit back to the old country, generally to an impoverished village. In 1927, Frank Costello, already a racket millionaire, returned to the village of Lauropoli, an obscure hill town in Calabria, Italy.

Following obligatory services in the village church, the entire populace, man, woman and child, formed a line on the church steps to greet Don Francesco Castiglia. Costello's biographer Leonard Katz tells the story in Uncle Frank:

One by one Frank's sister introduced them, and for each she had a tale of woe.

"His wife needs an operation."

"Five thousand lire. Next."

"He wishes to send his son to school to learn a trade."

"Three thousand lire. Next."

"A landslide destroyed his crops."

"Two thousand lire. Next."

"Her husband died suddenly and left her with two small children."

"Eight thousand lire. Next."

And so it went until the line was exhausted.

It was in Lauropoli that Costello made his grandest buy of all. A mousy little man approached and handed him a piece of paper, explaining it was an IOU signed by his mother. He had given her two sacks of flour on account, and she had left for America without paying him. Costello recognized his mother's handwriting and not only redeemed the IOU but paid handsomely in interest for the intervening 35 years.

"I never wanted a piece of paper so bad in my life," he told a friend years later. "The old bat nagged me to death all my life. It was always: 'Frank, why don't you get out of the rackets?' or 'Frank, why don't you go straight?' She always swore she never did anything wrong in her life. I wanted that piece of paper to show her how she had beat this poor old guy out of two sacks of flour.

Tony “the Ant” Spilotro

He was from 1971 to 1986 "the man"—the most feared hoodlum in Las Vegas, and hoodlum was perhaps the most polite name for Tony Spilotro. He really lacked the finesse to do his job, a role previously played by representatives like Johnny Roselli. Spilotro was more at home as a hit man, squeezing a victim's head in a vise until his eye popped out to get him to talk.

Spilotro learned his killer craft under Mad Sam DeStefano, perhaps the most sadistic of all the Chicago Outfit's enforcers. DeStefano was a master at torturing and killing with an ice pick, among other pathological methods, and Spilotro proved an apt student.

He killed with precision and without failure (he even took care of DeStefano when it was decided he had to go), and he attracted enthusiastic attention from the top masters of the organization, such as Tony Accardo, Joey Aiuppa and Jackie Cerone.

The position of enforcer in Las Vegas opened up when Marshall Caifano was withdrawn for having attracted too much attention to himself, and Spilotro took over. Unfortunately he chose to ignore many edicts from the mob (save that of carrying out hits, which was a matter of pure joy to Spilotro).

At the helm Spilotro set up burglary rings to take the tourists, something the outfit opposed. It wanted the gamblers to come to Vegas because it was crime free, or as crime free as the mob wanted it.

Killings, which the mob also didn't want, were done in Vegas. The preferred method was to take victims out to the desert in Arizona, slaughter them and hide their bodies. Spilotro also began dealing in dope. This was a capital offense in Chicago, but Spilotro figured he was safe so far away from the Windy City.

Then there was the messy love triangle involving Spilotro and Lefty Rosenthal—the mob's "inside man" in the casinos—and his beautiful wife Geri (a tale portrayed in the book Casino by Nick Pillegi and the movie by the same name).

Spilotro could have had far more beautiful and younger willing showgirls than ex-showgirl Geri, and the affair complicated matters since he and Lefty were supposed to run things for Chicago together. But scoring with Geri was the ultimate aphrodisiac for Tony, or as former FBI agent William F. Roemer Jr. put it, "Now he had a chance to screw his pal!"

Chicago viewed it as a messy and violent soap opera, a minor matter that should not have set off major repercussions. But there were far more serious problems caused, the mob felt, by Spilotro. His inattention and headline grabbing sparked a tremendous crackdown in Vegas.

Nevada authorities, working with undercover FBI agents, seized control of the Stardust—the biggest cash cow of all the casinos, with a skim running into the millions. It was the first step in the complete uncovering of the skimming done at many casinos.

Meanwhile as the law closed in on Spilotro, some of his closest associates whom he had brought to Vegas turned informer to save themselves. Their information led to the arrest and conviction of the top mafiosi in Milwaukee, Kansas City and Chicago.

Spilotro could not have done anything more wrong. Yet, amazingly, the press speculated that with the outfit's leadership going to prison, most for the rest of their lives, it remained for Tony Spilotro to take over as the new head. This was sheer nonsense.

Joe Ferriola was anointed the new boss. In his induction speech to the capos of the outfit, as spies within the mob reported, he had only one item of business to discuss. He announced, "We wouldn't be in the mess we are now in if it weren't for one thing. The way that asshole out there in Las Vegas has ruined us."

Rather than being promoted to boss, Spilotro was slated for execution. Tony was recalled from Vegas supposedly for an important meeting. He and his brother Michael were taken at gunpoint to a cornfield and a pre-dug hole. Both were batted unconscious and buried, still alive. That touch probably had been sanctioned by the outfit.

The FBI learned the details of the brothers' gruesome end from the wife of one of the mob diggers who had prepared the hole. No one was ever convicted for the murders. Probably no one cared that much anyway.

Jimmy “Jerome” Squillante

The boss of the New York garbage collection racket—picking up trash at exorbitant rates or not at all—Jimmy "Jerome" Squillante, was considered a vicious killer.

Informer Joe Valachi named Squillante as one of the gunners who murdered Frank "Don Cheech" Scalise, underboss to Albert Anastasia, on June 17, 1957. Scalise, one of the most important allies of Lucky Luciano since bootlegging days, was picking out some fruit at a favorite fruit stand in the Bronx.

Squillante and another gunman walked up behind him and put four bullets into his neck and the back of his head. Ironically, according to Valachi, Squillante had been sponsored some years earlier for Mafia or Cosa Nostra membership by Scalise.

After Cheech's death, his brother Joe Scalise publicly vowed vengeance. Joe undoubtedly thought Albert Anastasia would back him, but the latter remained oddly quiet, and Joe, nowhere near the menace that his brother had been, lapsed into silence and disappeared from sight. After a couple of months, however, Joe Scalise got word that all was forgiven, and he returned to his favorite haunts.

According to Valachi, Joe made the mistake of accepting an invitation to a party at Squillante's home on September 7 where he was fallen upon by celebrants armed with butcher knives. Squillante personally cut Joe's throat. The body was cut up into disposable sections and hauled off by one of Squillante's trash trucks.

Squillante himself only survived the Scalises by three years. He was indicted on extortion charges and vanished. Apparently, the word went, it was decided that Squillante was not the sort who could stand the pressure of trial and prison. He was "put out of his misery."

Squillante's corpse was not carted away in one of his own vehicles. Instead, after he had been dispatched with a bullet in the brain, he was loaded into the trunk of a car, and the car was put through a crusher that brought it down to a compact scrap cube ready for melting in a blast furnace.

Joseph “Doc” Stacher

When a trio of Israeli journalists were engaged in the late 1970s in writing a biography of Meyer Lansky, their prime source of material was a former top syndicate mobster and longtime intimate of Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello.

Joseph "Doc" Stacher, who emigrated to Israel in 1965, revealed considerable information about organized crime in America, almost as much as the better-publicized informers. But, unlike the stool pigeons, Stacher wasn't tattling. Said the Lansky biographers: "He was so proud of Meyer that he felt we should know the truth about his old friend's exploits."

Stacher had reason to be grateful to Lansky, who made him a millionaire several times over, and Stacher was typical of many young gangsters—Jewish and Italian—who remained loyal to Lansky all their lives. Brought to Newark, New Jersey at the age of 10, Stacher quickly moved from juvenile thief to important member of the Bug and Meyer gang, headed by Lansky and Bugsy Siegel.

In the 1920s he was running truckloads of bootleg liquor with the gang as well as aiding emerging New Jersey syndicate leader Longy Zwillman run many of his gambling enterprises.

In 1931 Stacher was the chief organizer, on Lansky's orders, of a meeting of all the top New York–area Jewish mobsters at the Franconia Hotel. At the conference, it was decided that the "Jewish Mafia" would merge with the Italian Mafia into a new national crime syndicate—what eventually became organized crime in America.

Lansky made Stacher his man in Las Vegas, representing the mob's interest there, especially as a payoff man. He also operated as the official bribe paymaster to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, who "allowed" the syndicate to build and operate lavish casinos on the island.

It was not until the 1960s that the U.S. government finally nailed Stacher for any meaningful charge, that of income tax evasion. Facing a five-year rap, Stacher could not be deported to his native Poland which would not accept him. Instead he made a settlement with Internal Revenue and immigrated to Israel, a right he had as a Jew under that country's "Law of Return."

Stacher worried if he would get Israeli citizenship and reputedly had his longtime close friend, singer Frank Sinatra, intervene through friends for an Orthodox member of parliament to come to his assistance. The M.P. owed Sinatra because the singer had contributed heavily to the American fund-raising done for religious educational institutes in Israel.

To further aid the M.P.'s cause Stacher donated $100,000 for an Orthodox charity. Instead, the M.P. used the money to build a kosher hotel in Jerusalem. Outraged at being ripped off, Stacher sued in a court case that drew headlines and laughs throughout the country.

Israelis were amused that such a giant figure in American crime could be so taken by a meek-looking rabbi. Stacher was regularly referred to in the Israeli press as one of the leaders of the "Kosher Nostra," as distinguished from the Cosa Nostra. In the end Stacher got his money back.

After Stacher demonstrated to other Jewish mobsters that they could find a haven in Israel, scores followed his example. Lansky himself tried to immigrate in 1971, but public uproar as well as heavy pressure on the government by American officials made him too notorious and he was kicked out of the country.

When Stacher died of cancer in 1977, Lansky, back in the United States, sent an enormous bunch of red roses, the inscription on the ribbon reading: "To Doc from Meyer." Stacher's funeral was rather impressive by Israeli standards but was small potatoes compared to the gangland send-off he would have gotten in the States.

Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno

In October 1986 Fortune magazine rated Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, the 75-year-old head of New York's Genovese crime family, as America's top gangster for power, wealth and influence.

Not all experts would agree with that assessment or indeed, despite federal prosecution of Salerno on racketeering charges, that he ever became the boss of the Genovese clan (since the death of Funzi Tieri in 1981). They hold the theory that elderly Philip "Cockeyed Phil" Lombardo really reigned.

What is not in dispute is the fact that Fat Tony through the years was able to strike terror in others, at least outside the Mafia, if not quite as thoroughly within it.

Under Genovese boss Tieri, Salerno functioned at times as consigliere while at the same time allegedly bossing a $50-million-a-year numbers racket in Harlem, as well as a major loan-sharking operation. While there is much talk about the Mafia being pushed out of the ghettos by the emerging black and Hispanic gangsters, Salerno has long given the lie to that line.

For years one of Harlem's biggest operators, Spanish Raymond Marquez, reportedly paid Salerno 5 percent of his income for the rights to operate. Of course, it has always been alleged that everyone doing business in Harlem—be they black, brown, white or yellow—had to give Fat Tony something.

The reason: The wrath of Fat Tony was considered awesome. Fear of Salerno has even extended to informers placed under the federal witness protection program. One such witness who uninhibitedly identified a New Jersey Mafia boss, Gyp DeCarlo, balked when asked to identify Fat Tony. The witness had already testified that Fat Tony Salerno had been involved in certain wrongdoings, but on the stand he got cold feet and declared he had meant another Fat Tony Salerno.

In the 1970s and 1980s Salerno divided his time among Miami Beach, a 100-acre estate in upstate Rhinebeck, New York, and his apartment on posh Gramercy Park in Manhattan. He provided an indoor riding arena and private schooling for his children, and spent $27,000 on new cars—all on a declared income of $40,000. Salerno was sentenced to a six-month jail term in 1978—for the first time— on gambling and tax evasion charges.

Under him the Genovese crime family was said to operate in numerous fields and rackets, including narcotics, gambling, loan-sharking, extortion, waterfront activities, pornography, union rackets, carting rackets and vending machines.

Fortune started its hit parade of the nation's top 50 mob bosses in 1986 as a list somewhat akin to its annual list of America's top 500 companies. It said organized crime is a $50 billion a year industry and "mirrors the management structure of a corporation."

Impressed by Salerno's trappings of wealth, common to many top mobsters, the magazine declared him to be the top "earner" of the underworld. Lost in their description is an authoritative picture of the shifting tides of Mafia power.

From the late 1950s until his death in 1976, Carlo Gambino became the top mafioso in New York and the nation, in the process raising the smaller, former Anastasia family to preeminence over the larger Luciano-Costello Genovese group. Gambino was instrumental in the deposing of Genovese and slowly asserted his authority over the Genovese family, eventually installing Tieri, an old and loyal friend, as boss.

Before his own death, Gambino ordered control of his crime family passed to Paul Castellano, his brother-in-law. Castellano, although he headed the most powerful crime family, did not get that much respect in the underworld; Tieri pushed his family back to the top rung, although, ever-loyal to Gambino, he never sought to depose Castellano.

When Tieri died in 1981, Castellano and the Gambino family reasserted their old powers: Salerno and the Genoveses' efforts to expand through Philadelphia into Atlantic City were stunted, and the Gambinos took over more of the activities in the New Jersey gambling city.

Fat Tony maintained his tough-guy form right up to his indictment on RICO charges, when he realized his time had passed. Of all the defendants in the socalled Mafia Commission trial, Salerno seemed oblivious to any strategies to fight. During the trial, he spent his free time during recesses munching away on Baby Ruth and Mars bars and the like. Once while awaiting the return of the jury from lunch, he pulled out an Almond Joy.

A member of the prosecution's team, in a friendly moment, approached Fat Tony and offered him a granola bar, saying, "They're really much better for you, Mr. Salerno. Better than all that chocolate."

Fat Tony waved the granola bar away and said, "Who the fuck cares. I'm gonna die in the fucking can, anyway."

Fat Tony was right—he did die in the can five years into his 100-year sentence.

Battles of the Standard Oil Building

A Chicago Tribune artists' version of Al Capone's gunmen attacking Hymie Weiss
and Vincent Drucci in front of the Standard Oil Building, August 10, 1926.

The so-called Battles of the Standard Oil Building in 1926 caused Lucky Luciano to dub Chicago, "A real goddam crazy place. Nobody's safe in the streets." The fact that the remarks were made by a visiting New York businessman, gangster Lucky Luciano, goes far to explain why and how the term Chicago gangster became world famous.

In the first battle of Standard Oil, Hymie Weiss and Schemer Drucci, successors to the assassinated Dion O'Banion as leaders of the Irish North Side gang, were ambushed as they were about to enter the new 19-story building on South Michigan Avenue.

They were on their way to a bribe-paying meeting with Morris Eller, the political boss of the 20th Ward, who took care of protection for the mob's North Side speakeasies. Weiss and Drucci had just made it to the bronze Renaissance-style entrance when four gunners of the rival Capone Gang stormed out of a car and rushed them, guns drawn.

Spotting the enemy, Weiss and Drucci dove for the safety of a parked car, and, drawing their guns from their shoulder holsters, started returning fire. The area was choked at the moment with morning rush hour pedestrians. One bystander went down in the first volley, while scores of other citizens either ducked for cover or else stood frozen in horror.

Weiss wisely started to fall back, car to car, but Schemer Drucci, often referred to by Capone as "the bedbug," lived up to that sobriquet by charging right at his attackers. The frightened Capone gunmen backed off to a sedan parked on the other side of the avenue and then drove off, with a cursing Drucci firing after them.

Drucci jumped on the running board of a passing car, jammed his weapon to the driver's temple and ordered, "Follow that goddam car." Just then a police flivver arrived, and officers wrestled the crazed Drucci to the pavement.

Questioned by police, Drucci denied there was any gang battle at all, just a case of some punks "trying for my roll"; he flashed a roll of $13,500. The cops brought in Louis Barko, a Capone hood, who had been recognized as one of the gunners, but Drucci followed the underworld code and said, "I never seen him before." Barko and several other suspects were released.

None of the ensuing publicity convinced either gang that they did not have more right to the area than the citizens of Chicago. On August 15, five days after the first battle, Weiss and Drucci were again attacked at virtually the same spot.

They were driving in a sedan when gangsters in another car blazed away at them. The North Sider's car was riddled with bullets, but miraculously neither Weiss nor Drucci was hit. They jumped from their car and made it to the sanctuary of the Standard Oil Building, firing back over their shoulders.

On September 20, the O'Banion Gang made a famous counterattack by striking at the Capone headquarters at the Hawthorne Inn in Cicero. A convoy of eight cars filled with gunmen drove slowly past the establishment, and unloaded an estimated 1,000 slugs in an unsuccessful effort to kill Al Capone.

All they managed to do was nick a few pedestrians and hit Louis Barko in the shoulder inside the Hawthorne Inn. Later, the police arrested Drucci on suspicion that he had fired the shots that downed Barko. Barko, commenting on Drucci, said, "Never saw him before." Apparently he didn't even remember being brought before Drucci after the first Standard Oil shootout.

The outrage about the shootings was enormous, but nothing much came of it all. One sage said that somebody should have at least been saddled with a good stiff fine. But then again this was Chicago, "a goddam crazy place."

Stand-in, Mafia Substitute

The mob has often used "front men" and "standins" to take the rap for crimes committed by more important bigwigs. For example, it is considered necessary—and even proper—that Mafia rackets, such as gambling operations, take a hit once in a while to give the police, who may be providing protection, some credibility. But few important mafiosi relish the idea of going into a lockup and being mixed with common riff-raff.

A solution is offered by the "stand-in." Mafiosi bosses or capos enlist a "stand-in" to take the bust. He goes to the lock-up, is accused of being the racketeer involved and so on. If need be, the stand-in takes the rap and goes to jail in a conviction.

In return, the stand-in receives payment in cash, or the promise of a more important place in the mob afterward, or both. Occasionally, when an important mobster is grabbed before arrangements can be made, the fix is put on later. The stand-in takes over for the real criminal immediately after the first arraignment, even standing trial, and if found guilty, doing the time.