Bosses meet on eve of Apalachin convention

On this date in 1957...

Magaddino

On the eve of a scheduled Mafia convention at the Joseph Barbara estate in Apalachin, New York, underworld bosses and cousins Joseph Bonanno and Stefano Magaddino met November 13, 1957, at a private home nearby in Endicott, New York. The two men debated through the night.

The meeting and the content of the discussion were recalled by Bonanno in his autobiography, A Man of Honor.

Bonanno, boss of a Brooklyn-based Mafia family and the current chairman of the Mafia Commission, criticized the decision of western New York underworld boss Magaddino to set up the meeting while Bonanno was out of the country and unable to speak in opposition. Magaddino argued that Bonanno was upset over nothing. Magaddino reminded Bonanno that, when he left the U.S., he entrusted his underworld authority to Magaddino.

Bonanno noted that Joseph Barbara, called upon by Magaddino to host the large gathering, was in poor health and had misgivings about local police cooperation since he hosted a Commission meeting one year earlier.

Bonanno

Magaddino insisted that Barbara was just making excuses: "I never ask him for a favor. When I do, he tries to get out of it. Joe feels all right."

Bonanno also suggested that rival New York bosses Tommy Lucchese and Vito Genovese used appeals to Magaddino's vanity to manipulate him into quickly scheduling the convention. Bonanno reasoned that Lucchese and Genovese wanted national Mafia recognition of their ally, Carlo Gambino, who was just installed as a crime family boss following the assassination of Albert Anastasia. Recognition of Gambino undermined the leadership claims of rival factions in the former Anastasia organization.

Magaddino left Bonanno and headed to Apalachin around midday on November 14. (Bonanno claimed he did not go to the convention.) A police roadblock had already been set up around the Barbara estate and Mafiosi trying to leave the site were being stopped and taken to a New York State Police barracks in Vestal for identification.

See also:

• Apalachin party-crashers expose Mafia network (Writers of Wrongs)
•  A Man of Honor: The Autobiography of Joseph Bonanno.

Update: 'Whitey' Bulger killing

Update - 4 November 2018

The high-security Federal Correctional Institution at Hazelton, West Virginia, site of the October 30 killing of former Boston gang boss James "Whitey" Bulger, has been closed to visitors.

The prison's website contains a brief and unexplained notice: "All visiting at this facility has been suspended until further notice."

The Federal Bureau of Prisons has not explained whether the visitation shutdown is related to Bulger's killing and has not indicated when the suspension will be lifted.

While media reports have indicated that Bulger was choked and beaten to death by at least two Mafia-connected inmates from Massachusetts (and have provided specific identifications of those inmates), there has been little in the way of official news on the subject.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts issued a brief "Tweet" on October 30:

We received word this morning about the death of James 'Whitey' Bulger. Our thoughts are with his victims and their families.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of West Virginia issued a two-sentence press release on October 31:

The United States Attorney's Office and the FBI are investigating the death of James Bulger as a homicide. To protect the integrity of the investigation, no further details will be released at this time.

Bulger was eighty-nine years old and serving two consecutive life sentences for murders, racketeering and other offenses.  He was found unresponsive in the penitentiary at eight-twenty, Tuesday morning, October 30. Prison staff attempted life-saving measures. Bulger was pronounced dead by the Preston County Medical Examiner. Bulger arrived at the prison following a transfer one day earlier.

He was sentenced five years ago after a summer 2013 trial in Boston, Massachusetts. He was a fugitive between 1995 and 2011. He was arrested in California in 2011. In the 1980s, while engaged in his own illegal activities, he secretly aided federal authorities in dismantling the Mafia organization in the Boston area.

The Hazelton facility houses 1,270 male inmates. It has experienced a string of violent attacks. Bulger's killing was reportedly the third homicide inside the facility in the past seven months.

An official of the guards union at the prison told the press that Hazelton is dangerously understaffed. He said the prison currently has seventy-seven job vacancies, with more than half of those for guard positions.

See earlier report:

• Boston's Bulger is killed in federal prison (Writers of Wrongs)

Boston's Bulger is killed in federal prison

James "Whitey" Bulger, longtime Boston underworld figure, was found dead Tuesday, October 30, 2018, within a high-security penitentiary in Hazelton, West Virginia.

Sources indicated that Bulger was "killed." Federal authorities are investigating the circumstances.  The New York Times, citing two unnamed Federal Bureau of Prisons employees, reported that at least two inmates beat Bulger to death. The Boston Globe reported that the prison in Hazelton has experienced a string of violent attacks. Two other inmates were killed in fights at the understaffed institution earlier this year, according to the Globe. Bulger was found unresponsive at 8:20 a.m. Efforts were made to revive him.

Eighty-nine-year-old Bulger, sentenced to two life prison terms after being convicted of involvement in eleven murders, had only arrived in Hazelton on Monday, October 29. He was transferred from a prison in Florida and held for a time at a transfer facility in Oklahoma City.

Bulger was part of South Boston's Winter Hill Gang. While engaged in his own illicit rackets, he fed information to the FBI about Mafia rivals and assisted in the dismantling of the Angiulo Mafia organization in Boston in the 1980s. His cooperation with federal agents provided him with protection from prosecution for more than a decade. When authorities finally were poised to arrest Bulger early in 1995, he was apparently tipped off and vanished. The indictment against him included charges that he participated in nineteen gangland killings.

FBI corruption was revealed in 2002, when Bulger's handler, John J. Connolly, Jr., was convicted of racketeering and obstruction of justice.

Bulger quickly earned the top spot on the FBI's Most Wanted List. The government reward for information leading to his arrest reached $2 million in September 2008. A worldwide search (there were reports that Bulger might have fled to Sicily) ended on June 22, 2011, with Bulger's arrest in California. He had been living in Santa Monica with his longtime companion Catherine Greig. Agents found $800,000 in cash and more than thirty firearms hidden in their apartment.

Catherine Greig pleaded guilty to helping Bulger elude the police. She was sentenced in 2012 to eight years in prison. She remains behind bars in Minnesota.

Bulger came to trial at Boston's federal courthouse in June 2013. The jury concluded five days of deliberations on August 12, 2013, finding Bulger guilty of racketeering offenses and participation in eleven murders. On November 14, 2013, he was sentenced by federal Judge Denise J. Casper to two consecutive life sentences plus five years.

Born September 3, 1929, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Bulger grew up in a South Boston housing project. His criminal activity started at an early age. He was arrested in 1956 for bank robbery. Following conviction, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison, but served just nine years. When he emerged from prison, he became a key member of the Winter Hill Gang. A younger brother, William, went into politics and became a longtime leader in the Massachusetts State Legislature.

Sources:

• "Crime lord Whitey Bulger appears in LA court, remanded to Massachusetts," New York Post, June 23, 2011, nypost.com.
• "Fugitive Boston mobster arrested on Westside," Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2011.
• "James 'Whitey' Bulger killed in West Virginia prison, sources say," WCVB-5 Boston, Oct. 30, 2018, wcvb.com.
• "Whitey Bulger, galpal nabbed in California," Boston Herald, June 23, 2011.
• Butterfield, Fox, "F.B.I. agent linked to mob is guilty of corruption," New York Times, May 29, 2002, p. 14, nytimes.com.
• Harvey, Matt, "Update: U.S. Attorney Powell in WV...," WVNews, Oct. 30, 2018, wvnews.com.
• Kennedy, Helen, "Boston mobster James (Whitey) Bulger spotted in Sicily?" New York Daily News, Sept. 15, 2007, nydailynews.com.
• Ivory, Danielle, and William K. Rashbaum, "Whitey Bulger said to have been killed by inmates in prison attack," New York Times, Oct. 30, 2018.
• McFadden, Robert D., "Whitey Bulger, notorious Boston mobster and informant, is dead at 89," New York Times, Oct. 30, 2018, nytimes.com.
• Pulice, Chris, "Inmate death at United States Penitentiary Hazelton," U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Prisons, news release, Oct. 30, 2018.
• Rocheleau, Matt, and Emily Sweeney, "James 'Whitey' Bulger's killing is just the latest in a string of troubling violence for W.Va. prison," Boston Globe, Oct. 30, 2018, bostonglobe.com.

See also:

• Update: 'Whitey' Bulger killing (Writers of Wrongs)

Eleven years and a fine for tax dodger Capone

On this date in 1931...

Federal Judge James H. Wilkerson on October 24, 1931, sentenced Chicago Outfit leader Al Capone to eleven years in prison and a $50,000 fine for evading income taxes. Capone also needed to pay $215,000 in back taxes plus interest.

Chicago Tribune

One week earlier, a jury convicted Capone on five tax counts. Capone was found guilty of the felonies of evading taxes for the years 1925, 1926 and 1927, and of the misdemeanors of failing to file income tax returns for 1928 and 1920. The jury did not convict on counts relating to tax evasion in the years 1924, 1928 and 1929.

At trial

Judge Wilkerson sentenced him to five years in federal prison on each of the felony convictions, with two of those sentences to run concurrently. He added a year in Cook County Jail for the two misdemeanors. Capone had already been locked up in county jail for contempt, after it was shown that he pretended to be ill in order to avoid appearing before a federal grand jury.

As he returned to county jail after sentencing, Capone was in an angry mood and threatened a reporter who tried to photograph him: "I'll knock your block off." Later he pleaded with newsmen to put their cameras away. "Think of my family," he said.

Capone was refused release on bail pending the legal appeals in his tax evasion case. He brought his request for bail to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals but that was denied on October 27. When his appeals were exhausted, with the Circuit Court's affirmation of his sentence in February 1932 and the U.S. Supreme Court's early May 1932 refusal to review his case, Capone was moved from Cook County Jail to Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. His ten-year federal prison sentence would allow his release on good behavior in seven and a half years.

Capone's term in Atlanta was relatively brief. In the summer of 1934, he was transfered to Alcatraz Prison on the West Coast. His health deterioriated at Alcatraz. When he was freed from custody in November 1939, he was immediately placed in a Baltimore hospital for treatment of paresis. His final years were spent in retirement at Palm Island, Miami Beach, Florida. He died January 25, 1947.

Sources:

• "Capone gets writ; sent back to jail until appeal made," Bloomington IL Pantagraph, Oct. 27, 1931, p. 1.
• "Capone in jail; prison next," Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 25, 1931, p. 1.
• "Capone loses his last chance to keep out of pen," Ogden UT Standard Examiner, May 2, 1932, p. 1.
• "FBI History: Famous Cases: Al Capone," Federal Bureau of Investigation, accessed June 27, 2010. https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/al-capone (previously: http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/famcases/capone/capone.htm).
• "Prison tonight for Capone," Chicago Daily Tribune, May 3, 1932, p. 1.
• Certificate of Death, Florida State Board of Health.
• Florida State Census of 1945.
• Kinsley, Philip, "U.S. jury convicts Capone," Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 18, 1931, p. 1.
• Pickard, Edward W., "Chronology of the year 1931," Woodstock IL Daily Sentinel, Dec. 30, 1931, p. 3, and DeKalb IL Daily Chronicle, Dec. 31, 1931, p. 6.
• Prisoner Index, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.
• United States Census of 1940, Florida, Dade County, Miami Beach, Enumeration District 12-42A.

See also:

• 1929: Capone meets City of Brotherly Love (Writers of Wrongs)
• Out of prison, into hospital (Writers of Wrongs)
• Stroke complications take Capone (Writers of Wrongs)