Mussolini Shuttle

Shortly after his rise to power in Italy in 1922, Benito Mussolini launched an all-out war against the Mafia in Sicily. As a result, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 young mafiosi fled for America, where they provided fresh manpower for the old-line Mafia gangs. Many were happy to go, attracted by the huge monies that could be obtained in the bootlegging rackets.

Sicily’s most important Mafia leader, called by some observers “the boss of bosses,” Don Vito Cascio Ferro, masterminded the escape routes on what became known as “the Mussolini Shuttle.” The northern route called for smuggling the emigrant fugitives into Marseilles from where they were booked passage either directly to New York or to Canada, from where they slipped into the United States via Buffalo or Detroit. A southern route meant slipping out of Sicily to Tunis, thence to Cuba and on to Miami, Tampa, Norfolk or New Orleans.

Most of these emigrants owed allegiance to Don Vito and were expected to aid his obvious push to take over much of the Italian criminal activities in the United States. However, Don Vito himself was imprisoned by Mussolini in 1929 and died in 1932, leaving these erstwhile gangsters free to join various contending factions.


Most joined the Young Turks under the more Americanized gangsters such as Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello and would in time take part in the destruction of the old-line mafiosi or Mustache Pete elements, who had tried to rule the U.S. underworld according to the traditions of the Sicilian Mafia.

In that sense Mussolini did much to foster organized crime in America, a result Il Duce probably saw as rather amusing. However, Mussolini’s campaign against gangsters cost him much support among Americans of Italian descent who viewed the new criminal migrations as producing more crime in their communities and so stirring fresh anti-Italian feelings among the general population.

Mustache Petes

The early Mafia leaders in this country tried to maintain Sicilian criminal traditions in a new country and society. Younger Italian gangsters considered this impossible, preferring instead to cooperate not only with Italian criminals, but also with other ethnics—especially the highly organized Jewish gangsters. In time, the Mustache Petes—as the young mafiosi not-so-lovingly dubbed the old Sicilians—were considered an obstacle in “Americanizing” crime.

In New York and other cities, the Mustache Petes were eliminated from power, usually through assassination. But often, the younger generation of criminals, fattened by huge bootlegging profits, used political force and the police to isolate and so take the Mustache Petes out of circulation.

Among the younger gangsters were Lucky Luciano (always much more comfortable working with Jewish gangsters than with many of his own kind), Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Vito Genovese, Albert Anastasia, Tommy Lucchese and others.


Even Joe Bonanno, a young mobster perhaps more steeped in “tradition,” “honor” and “respect,” saw the need to modernize and so opposed the Mustache Petes. After the bloody Castellammarese War—which eliminated the old Mafia as a force in the United States—a far wealthier, healthier and more powerful “Mafia” emerged in organized crime.

Luciano and his cohorts found they could work well with such Jewish gangsters as Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Louis Lepke, Cleveland’s Mayfield Road Gang (later Nevada’s Desert Inn Syndicate) and Detroit’s Purple Gang.

The Mustache Petes, they felt, were too set in their ways to see the true riches and power a crime syndicate could bring. Besides, the old guard—the Morellos, Lupo the Wolf, Joe the Boss Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano—were interested primarily in exploiting fellow Italians and not the public at large.

Narcotics racket

It is difficult to estimate exactly how much wealth narcotics trafficking adds to the coffers of the American Mafia. But narcotics profits, alone, guarantee the organization’s enduring wealth and power. And these profits are regarded as the real source of funds for buying the Mafia’s political and police protection.

J. Edgar Hoover can legitimately be faulted for failing to go after the Mafia and organized crime, but his dogged efforts to keep the FBI out of narcotics investigations is strangely logical. He wanted to keep the reputation of the FBI simon-pure, something he knew would be impossible because corruption and bribery was virtually inevitable in policing the narcotics field.

According to a recent government estimate, the average heroin junkie needs about 50 milligrams of the drug each day to satisfy his cravings. Figuring the average cost at $65 a day, a habit costs $24,000 a year. Many experts consider such figures as much too conservative. But using those figures for a minimum 100,000 hardcore addicts, also a conservative figure, the heroin racket adds up to at least a $2.5 billion business. Add to this the massive trade in marijuana (with at least 10 million regular pot users) and cocaine (considered “safer” than heroin by most users) and the total dollar figure in the narcotics business is clearly staggering.


Of course, the cost to the narcotics dealers is penny ante compared to the rewards. By the 1970s, it was said that the return on capital invested made drug smuggling the most prosperous industry in the world. In 1960, a kilo of heroin was obtainable in Marseilles, France, where it was manufactured from morphine base, for about $2,500.

In New York, it brought $6,000 a kilo wholesale—and over $600,000 on the street. By 1980, a kilo of grade four heroin cost about $12,000 from the supplier and brought a quarter of a million dollars in New York at wholesale prices. Cut with quinine and milk sugar, the heroin sold for several million dollars at street prices. No legitimate business, even Arab cartel oil, could come close to that.

This bottom-line figure made it obvious that the Mafia’s so-called No Narcotics Rule was sheer nonsense. No criminal organization that accepts the murder of human beings as a routine part of business could pass up such profits on the grounds of “honor” and “morality.” Mafia leaders who attempted to proscribe narcotics dealing were either lying or deluding themselves. There was and is no way to keep their criminals out of crime’s most lucrative business.

John Nardi

One of the few criminals in recent years to attempt to dislodge a Mafia family from power with the aid of “outsiders,” John Nardi was a power in the Cleveland Mafia and high up in local Teamsters affairs. For years he had felt that he never got the recognition he deserved under the mob reign of John Scalish, and when the latter died in 1976, he made a bid for power in alliance with Danny Greene, head of the socalled Irish Gang.

Syndicate crime in Cleveland had always been ethnically mixed, with a strong representation of Italian mafiosi, Jewish gangsters headed by the resourceful Moe Dalitz, and various Irish criminals. By the 1970s, the Jewish elements had long since departed for the lush legal gambling climes of Las Vegas and illegal action in Florida. But under various Italian leaders, and finally Scalish, the Mafia had become fairly dominant. However, Danny Greene and the Irish gangsters in alliance with Nardi moved to take over the Cleveland rackets as well as the important mob influence within the Teamsters.

War broke out between the Nardi-Greene forces and those of the mafiosi under James T. “Blackie” Licavoli, also known as Jack White. The Nardi-Greene gangsters scored first, knocking off a number of their enemies with bombs planted in their cars. The Licavoli forces for a time seemed incapable of striking back.

They did come up with a plot to lure Nardi and Greene to New York where they could be hustled to a large meat-packing plant in New Jersey controlled by Paul Castellano, then taking over as boss of the Gambino crime family. It would be possible, as one plotter put it, “to kill them right there, freeze and bury them.”

As quaint a murder plan as it would have been, it never came to pass. Meanwhile, crime families in Chicago and New York grew impatient with the failure of the Licavoli forces to win out. Finally, the Licavolis built a better bomb trap than their foes had built earlier. They loaded a car with dynamite and parked it right next to where Nardi parked his automobile at his Teamsters office.

When Nardi came out to his car, an assassin pushed a remote-control switch which blew up the dynamite car and killed Nardi in the process. Later that same year, Danny Greene was murdered as well. Frank “Funzi” Tieri, head of New York’s former Genovese family, sent congratulations to Licavoli, having greatly admired the way Nardi had been dispatched.

Neighbors of mafiosi

Paul Castellano mansion in Staten Island

When in December 1985 Paul Castellano was shot to death on a New York City street, television and newspaper reporters scurried immediately to the exclusive Todt Hill section of Staten Island where the former head of the Gambino crime family had resided. They failed to find any neighbors with an ill word to say about Castellano. “Great neighbors,” one was quoted, “and a credit to the neighborhood.”

The local residents were particularly proud of the 17-room white-porticoed mansion at 177 Benedict Road which they referred to as “the White House.” Many felt the Castellano family added class to the neighborhood and certainly helped property values.

Such attitudes toward mafiosi by neighbors are hardly unusual. There have never been any major complaints from respectable citizens in fashionable Sands Point, Long Island, where there has long been a considerable Mafia colony. When Tommy “Three- Finger Brown” Lucchese died, he was considered in his Long Island, New York, suburb a “wonderful neighbor.” One told the press: “If he’s a gangster, I wish all of them were.”


Even in Brooklyn in what was the turf of Crazy Joe Gallo a reporter asked a neighbor if he thought the Gallo men were gangsters. “That’s only what the papers say,” was the response.

The general rule of thumb among members of the Mafia and their allies is that they merge with their neighborhoods. Home for many years for top syndicate criminal Meyer Lansky was a three-bedroom ranch-style house in Hallandale, outside Miami. He walked his dog, described rather uncharitably by some newsmen as “the ugliest dog in the world,” and drove rented Chevrolets. Mrs. Lansky helped out image-wise by selling her used clothing in the garage of the house in a typical display of middle-class frugality.

Frank Tieri, the boss of the old Genovese crime family, was also the epitome of neighborly kinship. Around his modest two-family house in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn, he could be counted on to guide an untended kindergartner out of the street if the child raced out after a ball.

Tony Accardo, the longtime Chicago big shot, a believer in living lavishly, might not have been quite as fondly thought of by neighbors. Often at Christmas time he would install a carillon that would send Christmas carols thundering through the otherwise placid and reserved River Forest area. Other residents probably did not appreciate the noise, but there is no record of any objection made by them. Such complaints would be un-Christian, un-Christmasy—and perhaps unhealthy.

While most neighbors think kindly of mafiosi, these neighbors can rest assured that they have had to pass muster with the mobsters. Most big mobsters have their boys run checks on all the neighbors to learn all about their habits and lifestyles. According to his daughter, Sam Giancana could inform Mrs. Giancana on all the goings-on of various neighbors.

When daughter Antoinette brought other children to the house, Sam immediately checked out their families. If he objected to something in their parents’ backgrounds—ethnicity or other faults—the children were not permitted in the Giancana household again.

It’s smart to stay on the good side of Mafia neighbors. One who did not was 51-year-old John Favara, a friend of John Gotti—known to police at the time as a capo in the Gambino family and called by the law one of the most violent mafiosi. In 1980, Favara ran over and killed Gotti’s 12-year-old son, Frank, in a traffic mishap officially declared accidental. Four months later, Favara was kidnapped as he left his job in a furniture plant; he was never seen again.

According to police, after the death of young Frank, the Favara family had received unsigned threat letters at their Howard Beach, Queens, home, and their car had been spray-painted with the word murderer. Police got reports that Favara had been chain-sawed to death, and then placed in a car that was run through a demolition machine and reduced to a one-square-foot block. Meanwhile, Favara’s wife sold their house and with her son and daughter moved far away from Howard Beach.

Nepotism and the Mafia

Gambino family

It happened at a meeting of the commission in 1988. Although there was great friction between John Gotti of the Gambino family and Chin Gigante of the Genovese family, and indeed the latter had even attempted to have the former whacked, there was an effort at friendly relations.

In a moment of pride, Gotti said that his son, John Junior, was now a made mafiosi. Undoubtedly Gotti expected a round of congratulations. He did not get any from the Chin. Instead, Gigante’s face dropped, and he looked grayer than usual through a five-day growth of beard (his usual composure), “Jeez,” he said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

It was not sentiment stemming from fear. He was truly sad, his voice tinged with genuine sympathy. No one said anything. Sammy “the Bull” Gravano who was present reflected later, “So here was Chin, who’s supposed to be crazy,” in effect saying that no mob guy should want his son to become a made member of the Mafia. As Gravano noted, “And there was John boasting about it. Who was really crazy?”


Actually most mafiosi claim they do not want their sons following in their footsteps. Most are not successful at preventing it. Their sons see their stature grow because of the fathers’ activities and men with limited education making big money, and their drive to follow in their footsteps often becomes irresistible.

Mobsters who succeed in setting their sons on a straight path usually swell with pride. Tommy “Three-Finger Brown” Lucchese never stopped boasting about his eldest son who went to West Point to lead a successful military career and life that avoided all connection with his father’s “business.”

Chin Gigante never permitted any of his sons to be made. Neither did Paul Castellano nor Sammy the Bull, the latter vowing he would see to it that his son never followed in his footsteps.

Carlo Gambino, at least according to mob dogma, always said he would have his sons stay legit or he would kill them. The fact remains, however, he set them up in the mob-contaminated trucking business in New York’s garment district. If that was an effort to keep them clean, it was a rather unique approach.

There have been many instances of high Mafia bosses moving up as their father’s successor. That was true of the Trafficante father and son in Tampa, the Patriarcas in New England, the Zerillis in Detroit and so on. It remains difficult to determine if the fathers in these cases really wanted that kind of succession.

There is no doubt that Joe Colombo Sr. was following family tradition. His grandfather was in the mob and strangled for some breach of mob etiquette. Similarly, Colombo’s father Anthony was rubbed out in the same fashion in 1938, and it was well known he had broken mob rules. None of this disillusioned Joe Colombo. Once asked by a reporter if he had ever tried to find his father’s killers, Colombo gave him a withering look and snapped, “Don’t they pay policemen for that?” There was no rescuing the third Colombo from the forces of nepotism.

Today the most prominent Mafia son of course is John Gotti Jr. It was said that Gotti originally wanted both his sons, Junior and Frank, to be successful in legitimate fields. The effort to set them straight was wasted in Junior’s case. Years of training at a military academy did little good, and he gravitated to the fringes of the mob, soon being dubbed the “baby monster” by the press (and by other mafiosi out of hearing range of his father).

The elder Gotti had no choice but to accept his son into the Gambino family. It might have been different in the case of young Frank, who unlike his brother, showed a great aptitude for learning. Gotti sent Frank to an expensive private school and beamed about his son’s academic abilities.

He would corner mob associates (some of whom could barely read) with his report card. “Look at that, four fucking A’s! Did you ever hear of a kid who was so smart in school, huh?” And Gotti was even more impressed by the teachers’ many comments of praise added on the back of the report card.

Gotti intended to send his son to a top Ivy League university and probably would have made sure he became a leader in some honest profession.

Then 12-year-old Frank was killed while riding his bike when a car driven by a neighbor, John Favara, struck him. Favara would die for his no-fault driving. That probably placated John Gotti to some extent and perhaps weakened his resolve to save Junior from the life.

After John Gotti went to prison for life, he had to name his son “acting boss” of the crime family because under prison regulations he could visit his father and through various codes get orders to pass along to the mob. With John Jr.’s subsequent imprisonment for 77 months, during which time the elder Gotti died, the son could entertain the possibility he might get out and perhaps be free of his underworld problems. But by 2003 it was apparent that that probably would not come to pass.

It was said testimony by a highly prized turncoat could be the vehicle for numerous other charges against the younger Gotti. “Mikey Scars” DiLeonardo would probably implicate Junior in a number of violent crimes. One would be the stabbing death in 1983 of 24-year-old Danny Silva in a dispute in a Queens bar. Then there would be Mikey Scars’ testimony in the 1992 “Bonnie and Clyde” ordered hit of Thomas and Rosemarie Uva who had robbed a string of mob-tied social clubs. The pair ended up each with three bullets in the head.

Then there was the informer’s expected testimony concerning Junior’s alleged knowledge of the 1992 attempted killing of Guardian Angels founder and talk radio host Curtis Sliwa after he made disparaging onair remarks about the Dapper Don. Sliwa took lead in the back and in his legs as he desperately departed a taxi his assailants had stolen.

It is really only a fine point whether some mafiosi manage to keep their offspring from becoming made men. Among those who follow in their father’s footsteps there is no likelihood they will move up the management ladder. In fact, often the comparison with the father makes it most difficult for them. Joe Bonanno tried to make either of his sons fit for leadership but failed miserably. By the time of his death in 2002, the elder Bonanno had given up that hope, finally realizing neither could, would or perhaps even wanted to cut the mustard.

Both Chin Gigante and Sammy the Bull insisted they would never allow their offspring to take Mafia vows, but they were far less successful keeping them on the straight and narrow. In 2002 the Chin’s son, Andrew Gigante, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit extortion and accepted a two-year prison term. When Sammy the Bull was convicted in his “rehabilitation” days for a major Ecstasy racket, his wife and daughter were caught in the net, as well as his son, no matter the Bull’s vow. Whatever Sammy was, he was hardly a lovable dad.

In the Gigante, Gravano and Gotti cases nepotism apparently was a disaster for the offspring. Most mob guys fail at this, but at least one mob boss apparently did a good job of shielding his son from any criminal activities. Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo was one major godfather who shielded his family, whom he called “the dearest thing in the world,” and insisted their privacy not be tampered with.

Carolla never provided any information about his survivors, a son and daughter, and his orders were still strong enough on his death in 2000 that friends and allies would not provide any information about them.

Eliot Ness

In 1928, a University of Chicago graduate, 26-yearold Eliot Ness, was put in charge of a special Prohibition detail set up to harass the Capone gang. The local police and regular Prohibition agents were incapable of doing so since most, if not all, were on one or another of Capone’s bribe payrolls.

Ness set about assembling a squad of nine agents who would be “untouchable,” or unbribable. Meticulously, he went through hundreds of files until he came up with nine agents—all in their 20s—who had “no Achilles’ heel in their make-ups.” Incorruptible, they also were experts in varied activities helpful in fighting bootleggers—wiretapping, truck driving and, above all, marksmanship.

When the detectives moved into action, the underworld soon found them to be dedicated to their task, defiant of all threats and violence and unresponsive to cash payments. It was the underworld, stunned to find lawmen of the period who could neither be bought nor frightened, that dubbed Ness’s men the “Untouchables.”


The Untouchables are now a part of American criminal folklore. Latter-day television, in a show called The Untouchables, attributed much more credit and impact to them than they deserved, insisting they practically brought the Capone organization to its knees. Actually, their frequent raids of mob stills and distribution centers did cost the Capones a considerable amount of money but hardly caused Chicago to dry up—despite the claims of Ness at the time and his enthusiastic biographers then and now.

Ness thrived on personal publicity and always informed the press whenever a major raid on a brewery was in the works. The army of photographers who descended on the site frequently got in the way and sometimes even caused a raid to be bungled, but Ness’s superiors were pleased.

The publicity he produced proved that the Capone gang was not invulnerable. And Ness did provide a sort of smokescreen, distracting Capone while other federal agents infiltrated his organization to come up with tax evasion facts that eventually sent America’s greatest gangster to prison.

The Untouchables

After the fall of Capone, Ness continued warring on Prohibition violations in Chicago and, later, in the “moonshine mountains” of Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio.

Although his Chicago exploits are best remembered, Ness’s most impressive work against organized crime took place in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was named public safety director in 1935 by a reform city administration. Cleveland at the time was as corrupt a big city as any in the nation, its police force notorious for being “on the pad,” taking underworld graft. Builders couldn’t operate in the city without paying off labor racketeers.

A vicious gang called the Mayfield Road Mob, Jewish and Italian criminals working in profitable harmony, strangled and blighted virtually every neighborhood with gambling, bootlegging and prostitution rackets. Violence was common on the streets, and gang killings and the one-way rides were about as prevalent as they were in Chicago. Given a free hand, Ness knew that if he was to create a new environment in the city he would have to reform the police department. He ordered mass transfers and fired officers for taking bribes or being drunk on duty.

During his six years on the job, Ness himself was the object of shootings, beatings, threats and even an attempted police frame-up. But in the end, Ness was able to carry out what was called his “Midwest Mopup,” transforming Cleveland, in the words of one crime historian, “from the deadliest metropolis to ‘the safest big city in the U.S.A.’” The Mayfield Road Mob was crushed, and such syndicate leaders as Moe Dalitz were forced to move their gambling operations to outlying counties, and, eventually, because of continuing pressure, into northern Kentucky.

During World War II, Ness served as federal director of the Division of Social Protection for the Office of Defense, cracking down on prostitution and venereal disease around military establishments and vital production areas throughout the country. After the war, he worked in private business until his death at 54 in 1957.