One of the most important members of the notorious Morello family, Peter “the Clutching Hand,” Morello was a devious killer whose tactics terrified his enemies. During the 1920s he was the bodyguard- adviser to Joe the Boss Masseria, regarded at the time as the most important mafioso in New York. Joseph Bonnano (Joe Bananas), shortly thereafter a boss of one of New York’s five crime families, made it clear why Morello was also called “the old fox”— he did Masseria’s thinking for him.
The Clutching Hand was cut down in August 1930 during the Castellammarese War. By whom is a matter of some dispute. Informer Joe Valachi insisted the job was done by Buster of Chicago, a mysterious hit man imported by Salvatore Maranzano, the leader of the anti-Masseria forces. This, like much of Valachi’s testimony, has been viewed with considerable doubt by Mafia watchers. Morello was cut down in his East Harlem business office, and it is doubtful that a stranger like Buster could have gotten to him, especially since at the moment he was handling a huge amount of cash, receipts from his loansharking racket.
Far more believable is Lucky Luciano’s version. The ambitious Luciano, like Morello, was allied with Joe the Boss, but he had decided by then that the time was ripe to get rid of Masseria. That being the case it was decided that Morello had to die first. As long as Morello lived, Masseria was considered impregnable, and even if the Boss were killed, Morello would undoubtedly go underground to carry on a fierce war with Luciano.
Luciano assigned Albert Anastasia and Frank Scalise to the job and they were able to penetrate Morello’s headquarters. They found Morello with a collector in his operation, Giuseppe Pariano, and, as Luciano put it, “he hadda get it too.” As a bonus, Anastasia and Scalise appropriated the $30,000 in cash lying on Morello’s desk.
Morello family
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| Founding Boss Giuseppe Morello |
The first Mafia family firmly established in this country was literally a family of criminals. The Morellos settled in New York in the latter part of the 19th century, after emigrating over the years from the Sicilian town of Corleone, a community credited with supplying more Mafia members to America than any other place on the island.
The American head of the huge clan of brothers, half-brothers and brothers-in-law was Antonio Morello, a brutal and cunning criminal credited with personally committing between 30 and 40 murders in the 1890s. His two younger brothers, Joe and Nick, succeeded him to leadership.
Joe was noted as even more vicious, and with his brother-in-law, the notorious Lupo the Wolf, operated the so-called Murder Stable in East Harlem where enemies or victims of the gang were taken and either convinced to give in or tortured and killed. The screams in the night from the Murder Stable were an awesome yet frequent sound in East Harlem.
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But Joe lacked the vision to be a great crime leader and he was soon superseded by his brother Nicholas. Not illogically, Nick Morello was described later as an early version of Lucky Luciano in that he also dreamed about forming a great criminal syndicate to run all major rackets in the country. However, he was assassinated by Brooklyn Camorristas in 1916, and the superstructure that was to become national organized crime remained unbuilt for another decade and a half.
Nick was the last Morello to achieve leadership of the clan, which later passed on to Ciro Terranova, who maintained, despite personal weakness, a measure of authority in the Mafia until the 1930s. Peter “the Clutching Hand” Morello rose to near top power as the number one adviser to Joe the Boss Masseria, but he was killed during the Castellammarese War in 1930. His demise, since he was clearly the brains of the Masseria loyalists, assured the doom of Joe the Boss.
This hardly spelled the end of the Morellos in organized crime. Today a great many Morello descendants remain entrenched in various New York–New Jersey Mafia rackets.
Willie Moretti
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.
Cesare Mori
Probably no individual was more responsible for the mass exodus of mafiosi from Sicily to the United States than Cesare Mori, one of Benito Mussolini’s most devoted agents of suppression. Mussolini had used Mori earlier to wipe out socialist unrest during his political campaign in Bologna, and Mori was one of the chief architects of Mussolini’s 1922 march on Rome when he seized complete power.
As a reward for fascist labors, Mussolini appointed Mori prefect of Palermo, the most powerful position on the island. Mori’s principal task in Sicily was to unseat the lazy and corrupt administrators and replace them with ardent Fascists. Since the administrators in most of the towns were allied with the Mafia, the “Honored Society” fell into conflict with the Fascists.
The Mafia used the same tactics of terrorism in fighting the government that it used against its many victims. Many of Mori’s new appointees were assassinated as soon as they took office. The Mafia even carried its vengeance into downtown Palermo, murdering leading Fascists in the streets before hundreds of witnesses.
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In 1924 Mussolini himself visited Sicily and was embarrassed by the Mafia in Piana dei Greci, where the mayor, Don Ciccio Cuccia, who was also the Mafia boss of the area, bawled Mussolini out for coming with so many police motorcyclists to guard him. He said, “Your Excellency has nothing to fear when you are by my side.” Then he turned to his men and announced, “Let no one dare touch a hair of Mussolini’s head. He is my friend and the best man in the world!”
Inwardly, Mussolini seethed, understanding full well Don Ciccio’s message that he, not the leader from Rome, was the true power. Don Ciccio made the point all the more clear when Mussolini was slated to make an address from a balcony to the local populace. The only audience the Mafia leader permitted to show up, one account states, was “twenty village idiots, one-legged beggars, bootblacks and lottery-ticket sellers.”
The enraged Mussolini afterward ordered Mori to wage all-out war against the Mafia. Two months later Cuccia vanished into a Fascist prison, and the drive to stamp out the Mafia went into high gear. Mori’s methods were, if anything, more ruthless and barbarous than those used against the socialists. Rights of those arrested were wantonly abused. Confessions were extracted by torture.
One of the most common methods involved stretching a suspect on his back over a wooden box with his hands and feet wired to the sides of the box. The victim was then drenched with brine and whipped. The brine made the lashes more painful but left no marks. Other tortures involved administering electric shock to the genitals, one of the earliest known uses of this brutal method, and forcing prisoners to swallow saltwater through a funnel until their stomachs swelled painfully.
Fascist judges paid no attention to such minor details and convicted accused mafiosi by the hundreds. An estimated 600 innocent persons were also convicted through such tortures and the lying testimony of jealous neighbors or Fascist Party members.
In some cases members of separate Mafia gangs were convicted of the same crimes in different courts, and others were convicted of crimes that had never occurred. From the American point of view, the worst aspect of Mori’s campaign was that it caused at least 500 young mafiosi to seek refuge in the United States.
Mori terrorized the citizenry in the Mafia-infested Western provinces and paraded about as a conquering Roman of old. It was common for towns he visited to decorate triumphal arches with the welcoming words, “Ave Caesar.”
Mori’s campaign ended in 1929 following the conviction of Don Vito Cascio Ferro, the most charismatic of all the Mafia leaders, on a framed-up charge of smuggling. Don Vito, who died in prison in 1932, denounced his judges in court, saying, “Gentlemen, since you have been unable to find any evidence for the numerous crimes I did commit, you are reduced to condemning me for the only one I have not.” In any event, by the time of Ferro’s death, Mori had crushed most Mafia organizations. Those that survived pledged fealty to Mussolini, a position they maintained until the Allied invasion of Sicily during World War II.
Whatever is thought of Mori’s methods, there was little doubt that he offered the world the most authentic description of the Mafia, one that applies still today both in Italy and in the United States— even if it conflicts with the versions offered by American governmental agencies and such controversial informers as Joe Valachi.
In a book he later wrote, The Last Struggle with the Mafia, Mori noted it was not an “association in the sense of being a vast aggregate organized and incorporated on regular principles.” The Mafia, he observed, functions with statutes, rules of admission, and election of chiefs. The chief attained power simply by imposing his will on others. Members were accepted automatically if they had the proper qualifications and were automatically expelled or permanently eliminated when they no longer met these qualifications.
Profits were not divided by any set measure but went proportionally to the strongest. Only in a few cases, Mori said, were there any Mafia groups that held regular meetings, had secret laws and used concealed marks of recognition, but they were clearly the exception to the rule. Most important, Mori found the Mafia to be a “potential state which normally takes concrete form in a system of local oligarchies, closely interwoven, but each autonomous in its own district.”
This description is true of organized crime in the United States today. A crime family in New York would not dream of going into Detroit to kill an individual without clearing it first with the local powers and indeed would most likely request the local organization to take care of the matter for them. It would then be up to the local organization to comply if it so wished.
If however it preferred to grant the proposed victim sanctuary, there is little the outside crime family can do. The organization of such crime fiefdoms clearly is not based on tradition, but rather on raw power. It is this tradition of Mafia power and regional autonomy that keeps organized crime in America somewhat disorganized.
The disorganized nature of the Mafia kept Mori from achieving total victory and left him with many adversaries in Sicily. Mori died in 1942, probably a pity from the mafioso point of view since Mafia vengeance on him under protection of the Allies would certainly have been as brutal as the justice accorded Mussolini by the partisans.
Samuel J. “Nails” Morton
Nails was a top enforcer for the Dion O’Banion Gang, virtually the only Jew among the North Side Irish mobsters. As much as any single gunner, Morton was responsible for holding the Italian gangsters under Torrio and Capone—as well as the Genna brothers and others—at bay on the North Side from 1920 to 1924.
Morton, known by the police to have committed several murders, enjoyed respect bordering on terror from other mobsters mainly because he had won the Croix de Guerre in France in the Great War and been promoted on the battlefield to a first lieutenancy. That, and the fact that he concocted very inventive death traps for foes, made rival gangsters avoid confrontations with him. Often he would try to lure an enemy into combat by accusing him of making anti-Semitic slurs.
However, as celebrated as Morton could be for his killing ways, he was to become most noteworthy for the way he died and the gangland vengeance that followed.
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Nails, who developed a yen to circulate in finer circles, took to horseback riding in Lincoln Park “where the society swells ride.” One day in 1924, a riding stable horse threw Nails and kicked him to death. It was an act that could not be overlooked or forgiven. Four leading O’Banions—Bugs Moran, Little Hymie Weiss, Two Gun Alterie and Schemer Drucci—descended on the riding stable and at gunpoint kidnapped the offending horse.
The creature was led to the spot where it had dispatched Morton, and there, after the very angry Alterie punched the horse in the snout, was shot in the head, once by each gangster, in worthy underworld fashion. Gang boss O’Banion bewailed the fact he had not been around when Nails was killed and vengeance exacted; such moronic behavior fit O’Banion as well as his men.
Yet despite his unsavory record, Nails was accorded an elaborate funeral with considerable military, fraternal and religious honors. City, county, state and federal officials were prominent in attendance, and the Chicago Daily News reported: “Five thousand Jews paid tribute to Morton as the man who had made the West Side safe for his race. As a young man he had organized a defense society to drive ‘Jew-baiters’ from the West side.”
A year after Morton’s death ill-fated plans were laid for a memorial tribute to him. The printed announcement of the service bore the names of Rabbi Felix A. Levi, General Abel Davis, Captain Ed Maher and the Reverend John L. O’Donnell. The principal address was to be made by a leading attorney, Frank Comerford.
Perhaps what sent matters awry was the added announcement that also participating in the tribute would be Johnny Torrio, Terry Druggan and Hymie Weiss (the new leader of the North Siders, Dion O’Banion having by then been assassinated). General Davis backed out of the arrangements, saying it would be an error to flaunt such gangsters and Morton’s record “in the faces of decent citizens.” The whole affair then fell apart. It was, said one writer, “another kick in the head for poor Nails.”
Motorcade murders
During the inception of organized crime in the 1920s, the motorcade system of killing came into vogue. Whether Hymie Weiss or Bugs Moran—both subsequent leaders of the Irish O’Banion Gang, the prime opposition in Chicago to the Torrio-Capone forces—invented the system is unclear.
Bugs Moran, a cunning if rather pathological killer, was always attracted to spectacular killings and probably deserves the credit. Certainly he headed up more such murder convoys than any other gangster.
Moran and a dozen gangsters, each armed with a fully loaded tommy gun and riding in a half-dozen limousines, swept past the victim’s home, place of business or hangout. As the motorcade slowed, each gunner spattered a thousand or so .45-caliber cartridges in the general direction of the target. Such overkill was generally effective, even if a few innocent bystanders occasionally got caught in the deadly hail of bullets. That was merely an unfortunate sidebar to otherwise spectacular success.
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The most publicized murder motorcade of all was one that failed, an attempt to rub out Al Capone at the Hawthorne Inn in Cicero, Illinois, in 1926. A two-story brick structure, the inn had been converted to Capone’s specification into a fortress. Bulletproof steel shutters protected every window, while armed guards were stationed at every entrance. The second floor was reserved for Capone’s private use.
The building, dubbed Capone’s castle, almost became Capone’s deathtrap. On September 20, Capone and bodyguard Frankie Rio were dining in the rear of the Hawthorne’s restaurant when a single car drove past and opened fire with a machine gun. When the shooting stopped, the pair, with the other diners, rushed to the windows and doors to see what had happened. There were no bullet marks. The gunners had been firing blanks.
Frankie Rio understood instantly and knocked Capone to the floor, falling on top of him. Just then a convoy of 10 cars passed slowly in front of the inn, and a seemingly endless number of guns protruding from every one of the curbside windows let loose a deadly hail of fire.
Directly above Rio and Capone, woodwork, mirrors, glassware and crockery splintered. A Capone gunman, Louis Barko, who had rushed into the restaurant when the blank shots were fired, went down with a bullet through his shoulder.
In all 1,000 bullets were fired, and the inn, restaurant, lobby and offices were literally ripped asunder. Thirty-five cars parked at the curb were riddled with bullet holes. Remarkably, no one was killed, although Mrs. Clyde Freeman, sitting in a car with her infant son on her lap, was struck by a bullet that creased her forehead and injured her eyes. Capone footed $5,000 in medical bills to save the woman’s eyesight.
Movie racketeering
The mobs moved in on Hollywood moviemakers during the reign of Al Capone, when the industry was still silent. Movie executives tended to be silent, too, when faced with Capone threats.
The Capones made their first move through George Browne and his associate Willie Bioff, a longtime pimp. Together, they ran Local 2 of the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE).
To show what fine fellows they were, Browne and Bioff had the union ladle out free soup for unemployed actors. And the two proceeded to ladle more than soup. That same year they pressured a large financially pressed Chicago movie chain to cancel 20 percent paycuts on its employees. As an alternative, Bioff said they would take $20,000 under the table.
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By the time Capone went to prison for income tax evasion, his titular successor, Frank Nitti, had decided to move heavily into movie extortion. He slated Browne to run for the IATSE presidency in the 1934 election. Browne predictably had the Chicago votes sewn up; Lucky Luciano and Louis Lepke saw that he got support in New York; and Al Polizzi took care of the campaign in Cleveland. Browne won in a walk. And Willie Bioff went along to watch over Browne.
For delivering unto Browne the union presidency the Chicago Outfit took 50 percent of all illegal money that was taken in. Later, the fee was raised to 75 percent. This did not represent a squeeze on Browne and Bioff. There was so much money coming in they had no complaint.
The fee for avoiding a strike by projectionists in New York was set at $150,000 (a fabulous sum for Depression days), in Chicago $100,000. Refusal resulted in stink-bombings of the theaters. In 1936 Bioff told the head of Loew’s, Inc.: “Now your industry is a prosperous industry and I must get two million dollars out of it.”
Bioff and Browne then worked out a settlement that called for the four big distributors—MGM, Loew’s, Paramount and Twentieth Century-Fox—to cough up $50,000 a year each, and a smaller company to pay $25,000. In addition, the two leaders got a number of concessions that pleased the union membership, and they were hailed at the 1938 convention.
Browne and Bioff then turned around and levied a 2 percent tax on all their members’ earnings, which brought in $60,000 a month. This did not please the membership; it led to a revolt. That, combined with exposures by columnist Westbrook Pegler, led finally to the duo’s conviction on racketeering charges in 1941.
Facing long prison terms, Bioff and Browne started talking. As a result of their testimony most of the Chicago Outfit’s leadership were convicted— Nitti, Phil D’Andrea, Paul Ricca, Charlie Gioe, Lou Kaufman and Johnny Roselli—and given 10-year prison terms.
They served the minimum sentence and were paroled in a little over three years, a development that provoked a national political scandal. When they got out, the mob influence in Hollywood had hardly deteriorated. Roselli continued to be a power in the movie capital and even turned movie producer himself, turning out a number of law-triumphs-overcrime epics such as He Walked by Night.
Roselli had no trouble getting to make these projects. He made the movie moguls an offer they couldn’t refuse. And when the mob wanted to promote the career of some worthy or unworthy actor or actress it had little trouble getting the proper results.
Since the movie shakedown convictions of Browne and Bioff, the mob has become much more sophisticated in its operations. A union threatens a strike and a lawyer-labor relations expert arbitrates it. He draws a colossal fee for his services on which, minus expenses, he pays the taxes. The balance is then cut up with Chicago.
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