Palermo Connection

Since the early 1960s, the central pipeline for heroin shipments to the United States has shifted away from Marseilles, France, following the New York Narcotics Bureau breakup of the so-called French Connection. The Marseilles shipments were thereafter replaced by the Palermo Connection—giving the Mafia, both Sicilian and American, a firm hold on heroin.

From 1973 to 1983 at least 60 percent of all heroin brought into the United States came through Palermo; as a result, that city, in impoverished Sicily, is one of the richest in Italy. Also as a direct consequence of the Palermo Connection, an average of two gang murders per week occur in the island capitol.

No one in Palermo has been safe. In 1982 alone, among the victims of Mafia violence were two judges, two police chiefs and a leading Christian Democrat political leader. The Sicilian Mafia’s power has remained undented despite unified political opposition.


Pio La Torre, the leader of the Sicilian Communist Party, and a member of the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission, became a forceful opponent against the secret society. He proposed the “La Torre law,” which would provide access to private bank accounts as well as legalize telephone taps on Mafia suspects. On April 30, 1982, La Torre was shot and killed in an ambush.

The same fate befell General Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the police official who had crippled the Red Brigades. Appointed prefect of Palermo, he demanded that the La Torre law be passed despite the death of the communist leader; instead, four months after La Torre’s murder, Alberto Dalla Chiesa was shot dead, along with his young wife and his police escort. This at last led to a vigorous campaign against the Mafia by the Catholic Church, with the pope visiting Palermo to denounce the society. The La Torre law was passed, and mass arrests and trials of alleged Mafia figures, including those in “white collar” professions, followed.

The international press was filled with reports of the inevitable decline of the Mafia, both in Sicily and, because of information gained through the investigation and testimony of high-ranking defectors, in the United States.

However, throughout the crackdown, at least 20 heroin refineries remained active in Sicily, with the capability of turning out a half billion dollars worth of heroin a week. As one expert stated in 1984, “It seems doubtful whether even the anti-Mafia law can get to the root of the problem.”

Pass: Mafia style Forgiveness

Chuckie English

A pass is an act of forgiveness by the higher-ups in the mob. It may or may not be more apparent than real. A classic case involved Chuckie English, a longtime lieutenant under Chicago boss Sam Giancana. When Giancana was hit, some of his most ardent followers were also eliminated, both before and after the murder.

It is standard mob procedure to eliminate those figures more likely to form a protective web around the target before he is killed or in other cases to eliminate those most likely to attempt vengeance. Some supporters however are left alone, an indication after a period of time that they have been granted a “pass” from the bloodletting. They are usually allowed to retain their posts in the family, although sometimes they suffer a demotion in rank.

English was allowed to live, but he was busted from lieutenant to common soldier and assigned to the Joe Lombardo crew, a division of at least 40 soldiers. In time English got a few bones tossed his way, a situation that should have contented him. That was not Chuckie’s style unfortunately, and for years he often whispered to others that the regime under his old buddy Giancana had been so much better than the current one. Amazingly it took a full decade for English to outwear his pass.

Eventually Chuckie’s bleating got more vocal and the boss of bosses of the Chicago outfit, Tony Accardo, had enough. English was taken out in the parking lot of his favorite hangout, Howarth’s. His example made it obvious that a pass demands a certain code of behavior. Of course, those granting the pass are also supposed to follow a code of behavior—unless the pass is granted with fingers crossed.


A case in point was Willie Boy Johnson, a mob associate of John Gotti’s, going back to their kindergarten days. In later years Willie Boy got very upset about how the mob was treating him, and when he got in trouble with the law, he bargained his way out by agreeing to inform on gang activities. In a monumental screw-up by authorities Gotti found out about Willie Boy’s longtime snitching, which appeared to have been fairly selective.

In any event both he and Gotti were brought up in a case of attempted murder, and if Willie Boy had talked more Gotti would have lost his “teflon don” image early on. According to Sammy “the Bull” Gravano in Underboss, Gotti told Willie Boy: “You did a bad thing all them years. But I’ll forgive you. It’s not the first time it happened. You can never be with us after this case. But nothing will happen to you.”

According to Gravano, Johnson wanted more assurance and asked Gotti to swear on his dead son’s head. Gotti did, and Willie Boy stayed with the defense. Gravano recalled that Willie Boy swallowed Gotti’s promise completely.

After Gotti beat the rap, he waited until Willie Boy really believed he’d gotten a pass. One day Willie left his house and his pass expired as he went down with 13 bullets to the head.

A pass that has apparently held up was one for Joe Bilotti, the brother of Tommy Bilotti who went down with Paul Castellano in 1985. In the aftermath of the double murder, Gotti took over the family and he was inclined to take out Joe Bilotti as a matter of prudence. According to Sammy the Bull, he intervened and told Gotti that Joe was a good soldier and would live by the rules. Another Gotti supporter agreed with the Bull, and the dubious Gotti permitted Gravano to meet with the surviving Bilotti.

Gravano claimed he reassured Joe all was well, that the killing of his brother was simply business. He reminded Joe that he had a tough job with 18 kids to take care of (Joe and Tommy each had nine kids). Rather proudly the Bull bragged in his book: “And Joe’s still alive today.”

It may be Joe Bilotti did not care for those words in Underboss, since it essentially pegged him as a Gravano man, something that might not sit well since Gravano became the greatest mob stoolie of the 1990s.

It could become another example that a pass is not necessarily forever.

Raymond L. S. Patriarca

Some Mafia observers contend that New England’s Raymond Patriarca was the most double-dealing Mafia boss in the country. The head of the Massachusetts state police once told a legislative committee that Patriarca was so ruthless and devious that he regularly hijacked liquor shipments he was hired to protect.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Patriarca, until his death in 1984, was much respected by other Mafia bosses, and he was frequently called in to serve as a mediator in gang wars. While doing time in the early l970s for his part in a double murder conspiracy, Patriarca was, much like Vito Genovese, able to run his mob from behind bars. And whether imprisoned or free, he often warned other Mafia bosses to stay out of his territory—all of New England—and they did.

Patriarca ran his organization with an iron fist. He once ordered an old mafioso to murder his own son because the son had cost Patriarca some money in a crime arrangement that went awry. When the old mafioso fell to his knees, crying he could not kill his own son, Patriarca threw the man out of the organization. The only reason he did not have the old man killed was that Henry Tameleo, his underboss managed to cool Patriarca off and get him to relent on the murder order.


Patriarca’s ruthlessness extended to his men in other ways. Once Patriarca put up $22,000 for his men to handle a load of stolen cigarettes. Unfortunately, the FBI seized the load. That did not interest Patriarca in the least; he wanted his money back— Patriarca was always a partner in profits, but never in losses. His men had to scrounge up the $22,000 to pacify their boss.

Patriarca also tolerated no upstart trying to start up criminal activities in his area. He demonstrated his thoroughness in the Irish wars in Boston when a young gangster named Bernard McLaughlin tried to muscle in on the mob’s loan-sharking rackets. McLaughlin and his supporters were virtually exterminated to the last man. In another explosion of his infamous temper, Patriarca for a time put a death sentence on his own brother because, while in charge of mob security, he had failed to spot a FBI bug placed in Patriarca’s office.

Born to Italian immigrant parents in 1908 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Patriarca moved to Providence when he was four. He left school at eight to shine shoes and work as a bellhop. Eventually he discovered that armed robberies and working for liquor smugglers during Prohibition were more rewarding. In the 1930s the Providence Board of Public Safety branded him “Public Enemy No. 1” and ordered the police to arrest him on sight.

Yet in all Patriarca went to jail only once in that period, for armed robbery in 1938. He got five years but only served a few months, which brought legislative calls in Massachusetts for an inquiry into the pardon granted him by then-Governor Charles F. Hurley. It turned out that a prime factor behind the pardon was a heartrending plea from one Father Fagin, who turned out to be a nonexistent priest. It developed the petition had been drawn up and guided past government officials by the governor’s right-hand man, Executive Councilor Daniel Coakley. Coakley was later impeached and barred thereafter from ever holding public office in the state.

The scandal marked Patriarca as a man with political connections, and by the early 1940s he had assumed a major Mafia leadership role. In the 1950s, he became the top boss, his influence extending from Providence to cover Boston and the rest of New England.

For a quarter of a century, as Patriarca built his base, he enjoyed relatively little public exposure. Finally though, because of Joseph Barboza, a Patriarca enforcer and hit man who turned informer, he was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, specifically having a mob member, Rocco DiSiglio, eliminated for being the fingerman for a stickup gang victimizing mob crap games.

He did six years for that, and when he came out he resumed leadership of the organization. Yet Patriarca enjoyed a spirit of loyalty where it might not be expected. Another mob informer, Vinnie Teresa, who effectively crippled much of the mob with his testimony in a number of trials, refused to testify against Patriarca. Raymond, he said, had always treated him fairly, and he would not cross him. There were few men who would have said that about Patriarca.

Pension bandwagon for wise guys

For years Genovese crime boss Vincent “the Chin” Gigante walked the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village in pajamas or bathrobe mumbling to himself and passing himself off as nothing short of feeble-minded.

It was revealed in 2003 that the Chin, from 1990 until his racketeering conviction and jailing in 1997, was on the dole from the government for his “disability,” while at the same time the government was trying to prove in court that he was faking. In all, the “Oddfather” was being awarded $900 a month for his alleged disabilities. In 2003 the Social Security Administration announced it was demanding that he return the money since he was “not entitled” to the benefits.

It was a matter of conjecture if the government would be able to get the money back. At least, however, the septuagenarian Chin had been cut off from his Social Security awards after he was incarcerated, the agency explained, because “the government’s already paying food, clothing and shelter” for him.


As it was, the Chin was a piker among big league mafiosi at putting fingers in the public till. Peter Gotti, the reputed successor of his brother John as head of the Gambino crime family, as of 2003 had raked in something like $5,000 a month in disability from Social Security and New York City for 14 years.

The exact amount was never revealed because of privacy laws. Gotti was listed as working as a “sanitation man” until he was injured after claiming he’d fallen off a sanitation truck and wrenched his back. City pensions may be paid to inmates and apparently have never been stopped to Gotti.

Many wise guys learn how to get on the pension bandwagon. Primo Cassarino, who was convicted along with Peter Gotti in March 2003 for shaking down action film star Steven Seagal, worked as a city garbage collector for 10 years, became fully vested in 1992 at $36,877 and then also claimed to have fallen off a truck and filed for disability.

Wise guys just seem to have real trouble staying on trucks. In this case Cassarino ended up with egg and whatever on his face when an FBI wiretap caught him discussing how he needed phony documents to renew the disability benefits.

All these disclosures had the potential of perhaps salvaging some of the public’s tax dollars. With Gotti in jail after his conviction but still not sentenced, a gimmick in the law might take away his loot if he—and other wise guys—were not only given prison time but fined as well.

The fine would allow the city to garnish Gotti’s pension. It remained possible that many wise guys will find that unsympathetic judges might very well slap on a fine to plug the pension loophole.

Carmine Persico

One of the most violent enforcers and collectors for Brooklyn Mafia don Joe Profaci, Carmine Persico was introduced to Profaci’s rackets by Larry Gallo. Eventually Persico joined Larry and his two brothers, Crazy Joe and Kid Blast Gallo, in an open revolt against the Profaci rule. Profaci, perhaps the most grasping Mafia boss in decades, extracted tribute constantly from his soldiers. Persico once complained to later-informer Joe Valachi: “Even if we go hijack some trucks he taxes us. I paid up to $1,800.”

With the Gallos and Persico there was a lot of nasty firepower standing up to Profaci, who relied on all his deviousness to resolve his dilemma. He promised to do right for a few of the rebels, including Jiggs Forlano and Carmine Persico, if they would return to the fold and show their fealty by going after the Gallos. Persico jumped at the chance and did all he could.

In fact, New York police would later say it was Persico who tightened the garrote on Larry Gallo when he was lured to a bar in Brooklyn, allegedly for an anti-Profaci plotting session. Gallo narrowly survived; a police officer walked in at the critical moment. It was a scene that was to be replayed in fictional form in The Godfather. The Gallos called Persico “the Snake” after that. So did the police. Persico advised his friends to call him “Junior.”


After Profaci’s successor, Joe Colombo, was shot in 1971, Persico became a capo under the almost secret rule of elderly Thomas DiBella who was boss of the family for three years before the FBI and other investigative agencies discovered the fact. Eventually DiBella stepped aside because of his years and functioned as consigliere, or adviser, while Persico, the former rebel, took over as boss.

Bizarre events dominated his reign, most of which was spent in prison (although this didn’t stop the federal government from indicting him in the mid-1980s on racketeering charges for crimes they said he masterminded behind bars). Persico became one of the very few mafiosi to ever make it on the FBI’s Most Wanted list after he fled the indictment and eluded capture for several months.

Persico was also a unique would-be hit victim who ended up with a spent bullet in his mouth after enemy mobsters pumped several carbine shots into a car in which he was riding. Persico spat out the bullet.

An avid reader about himself in the newspapers, Persico took deep offense in December 1985 when writer Pete Hamill, covering his racketeering trial for the Village Voice, recalled Persico’s younger days (Hamill had grown up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood). “Man to man,” Hamill wrote, “Junior wasn’t very good with his hands . . . But if Junior caught you while three others were holding you, he was devastating.”

Ignoring the advice of his lawyers, Persico penned an angry letter to the Voice, calling Hamill’s story “biased, degrading, angry, perverse, and unprofessional.”

Hamill’s response in part was:

Mr. Persico’s many years behind bars obviously have refined his prose style beyond the narrow limits he had attained 35 years ago in our old neighborhood. . . . In those days, his usual reply to criticism was to mutter, “Your sister’s box!” before creasing your skull with a length of pipe. Who now can dispute the possibilities for rehabilitation afforded by the joint?

However, Persico had more than a war of words to wage or a legal battle to engage of with the government. He had spent almost 10 years of the previous 13 behind bars, a fact that left his godfatherly role a bit frazzled, despite the government’s claims about what he could manage from prison. Another capo, Jerry Langella ran the family on the outside.

Persico had the misfortune of being out of prison and back in control of the Colombos when the government in 1986 polished its RICO approach in the Mafia Commission case against the top bosses of several families. Persico may have been the most outraged of the defendants about the use of membership in the Mafia as enough, or close to it, to win a conspiracy conviction. Persico, in his usual pride in his own abilities, acted as his own attorney.

His most memorable comment to the court was an anguished outcry: “Without the Mafia, there wouldn’t even be no case here!”

The Snake got it absolutely right. He also got a 100-year sentence for murder and conspiracy.

Parsley Racket, Restaurant Extortion

In a mid-Manhattan restaurant not long ago, four Happy Hour customers were served mixed drinks decorated with what they dubbed “green garbage.”

“What’s all this?” they protested to the waiter. He shrugged, “Mafia parsley.”

According to Jimmy Breslin, a columnist for the New York Daily News, steakhouses and other midtown Manhattan restaurants were serving “meals that appeared to be growing lawns.”

The proliferation of “green garbage” in New York restaurants is the result of the mob’s parsley shakedown. Restaurants are required to buy underworld supplied parsley with which to garnish their dishes. It is not enough that they heap the greenery on meats and salads, but they are under pressure to add them to mixed drinks. If confirmed martini drinkers find that parsley alters the lemon-peel tinge to their drinks, they are taken care of. The parsley is put at the side of the glass.


As the mob jacked up the price of parsley from 5¢ to 40¢ a bunch, some restaurateurs found their parsley bill running even with the cost of a waiter’s salary. Mobsters from East Harlem checked to make sure the restaurants were not stinting in the greening of their customers. In the 1980s some restaurants tried to cut parsley orders by saying business was off.

Since most customers simply pushed the parsley aside, the restaurants tried to recycle the parsley by washing it off and reusing it. True, a check showed the mob the restaurants were not stinting on putting out the parsley, but the suppliers were not fooled. A count of tablecloths and napkins given to mob-connected laundries proved that the restaurants were not ordering enough greenery.

Confronted by such a scientific survey, one steakhouse owner nervously ordered an extra 150 bunches of parsley on the spot.

In recent years, New York diners’ incredible appetite for parsley seems to have spread around the country. At about the same time the mob effectively put down the Great Parsley Rebellion in New York, it moved into Montana to spread the green. The Montana State Crime Control Commission reported investigating some restaurant bombings in Butte (called Apache Indian jobs because, done right, nothing is left but a few flaming timbers and a chimney).

The commission tied the bombings to the parsleyselling activities of New York mobsters. Further investigation revealed that one crime family had taken control of vast acreages in Ventura County, California, where parsley could be cut five times a year, enough eventually for the total greening of America.

Joseph Petrosino

The first police officer in America to battle the Mafia effectively, Joe Petrosino was named head of the newly formed Italian Squad of the New York City police in 1905. The need for the Italian Squad was overwhelming. At the turn of the century, more than 500,000 of New York City’s 3 million residents were Italian. But most of the cops were Irish with a lesser number Jewish. With nary an Italian on the force, the mafiosi gangsters enjoyed the particular advantage of a police force that could not understand them.

Petrosino had first been recruited to be a policeman in 1883 by Police Inspector Alexander “Clubber” Williams precisely because of his ethnic background. By 1895, Petrosino had risen to the rank of detective and was assigned to the Lower East Side.

He took time to learn the various dialects of the Italian immigrants squashed into the ghetto and to gain their confidence; soon he was gathering information that enabled him to solve many murders and extortions of the Black Hand. He reported to superiors that the Black Hand was not a distinct organization but various freelance criminals who threatened victims with death unless they paid protection money.


Petrosino nailed many Black Handers, including one who had tried to victimize opera star Enrico Caruso. (The singer and the detective became fast friends.) In 1901, Petrosino uncovered the infamous Murder Stable in Italian Harlem where some brutal mafiosi killed and buried at least 60 victims who operated in competition with their rackets or would not pay them protection money. It was for many the first proof of the Mafia’s existence in New York.

In 1905, Police Commissioner William McAdoo authorized the Italian Squad and put Petrosino in charge of the 27-man unit. In the four years Petrosino ran the squad, Black Hand crimes dropped by half. Several thousand arrests were made, and 500 men were sent to prison. In 1908, there were 44 bombings with 70 arrests, 424 Black Hand extortion complaints with 215 arrests. Also, numerous mafiosi were deported on Petrosino’s evidence.

Petrosino appeared before congressional committees, urging modification of the immigration laws to forbid the entry of known criminals. He warned that Italian authorities were phonying the passports of some immigrants to rid their jails of undesirables, a sort of pre-Castro boatlift.

Early in 1909 Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham sent Petrosino to Palermo, Sicily, to gather information about deportable criminals. The assignment was so secret that fellow officers were told he was home ill. Yet inexplicably a story appeared in the New York Herald attributing to Bingham the fact that Petrosino had gone to Sicily.

On the rainy night of March 12, 1909, Petrosino was standing in the piazza of the Garibaldi Garden when four shots rang out. Petrosino was hit three times, in the shoulder, throat and right cheek. His murderer got away. Later a strong case was made that the New York detective had been gunned down personally by Don Vito Cascio Ferro, the most important Mafia leader in Sicily.

Don Vito claimed to have spent the evening at dinner at the home of a Sicilian member of the Italian parliament, and his host backed up the story. However, many believe that Don Vito slipped away long enough to do the killing and then return to cement his alibi. Don Vito had the motivation to do the killing personally. A few years earlier Don Vito had come to America to expand his criminal empire, but had been run out by Petrosino.

The death of the legendary Italian detective sent shockwaves through New York City. He was brought back for a martyr’s funeral. A quarter million people jammed the streets of Little Italy as a procession of 7,000 escorted the body to the grave.

A short time thereafter, Bingham was fired as police commissioner because of the news story that revealed Petrosino’s whereabouts. Petrosino’s death had saved literally hundreds of mafiosi from deportation, a bitter fact that would plague the United States in later decades.