30 October 2018

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:
See also:

24 October 2018

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:

17 October 2018

Charlie Lucky's painful visit to Staten Island

On this date in 1929...

Rochester Democrat & Chronicle
Salvatore "Lucky" Lucania (also known as Charlie Luciano) was staggering along Hylan Boulevard at Prince's Bay just outside Tottenville, Staten Island, on the morning of October 17, 1929. Patrolman Blanke of the Tottenville Police Station took notice. Blanke saw that Lucania, a known Manhattan racketeer, had a badly bruised and swollen face and several knife wounds in his back.

Lucania told the police officer that he had been "taken for a ride" but provided no additional information. The wounded gangster was driven to Richmond Memorial Hospital for treatment.

While at the hospital, he was interrogated by Detective Gustave Schley. During the questioning, Lucania stated that he was standing at the corner of Fiftieth Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan the previous evening when several men forced him into an automobile and drove him away. According to Lucania's statement, his mouth was sealed with adhesive tape, his hands were cuffed together and he was forced to the floor of the vehicle. He was beaten and stabbed by his captors, and he eventually lost consciousness. When he regained his senses, he found himself on a roadside in Staten Island.

Lucania offered police no clue to the motivation of those who abducted and beat him.

NY Daily News

Later on October 17, Lucania was arraigned on a charge of grand larceny. He was released twelve days later, and the grand larceny charge was subsequently dropped. Lucania recovered from his wounds, but was left with visible damage to his face.

One of the persistent legends related to Lucania's "ride" states that his survival caused him to acquire his "Lucky" nickname. In fact, the press coverage of the incident proves that Lucania was already known by that nickname when the incident occurred.

The reason for Lucania's abduction remains a mystery.

The authorities and the press immediately speculated that underworld rivals intended to kill him and believed him to be mortally wounded when they tossed him from the automobile on Staten Island.

Burton Turkus, prosecutor of Murder Inc. cases, later asserted that Lucania was kidnaped and beaten by a rival gang trying to locate a cache of narcotics. Biographer Sid Feder also thought drugs were involved. He suggested that federal agents, trying to track a narcotics shipment from overseas, attempted to beat information out of Lucania. The authors of The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano dramatically but clumsily attributed the beating to a Mafia insurrection - an uprising that only began months after Lucania's beating.*

Sal Vizzini, a former undercover narcotics agent, said he was told by Lucania that New York police officers were responsible for his beating. Lucania told him the police were trying to locate Jack "Legs" Diamond and knew that Lucania at that time was part of Diamond's gang. Diamond went into hiding after being indicted in the summer of 1929 for murders at the Hotsy Totsy Club.


* It is generally accepted that the Castellammarese War erupted after Lucania's Mafia superior, Giuseppe Masseria, ordered the killings of underworld leaders Gaetano Reina and Gaspare Milazzo. Those killings occurred in February 1930 and May 1930. Salvatore Maranzano, leader of anti-Masseria forces in New York City during the Castellammarese War and the man Last Testament claims was responsible for Lucania's beating, was not in a position to command Masseria opponents until summer of 1930.

Sources:

  • "'Ride' victim wakes up on Staten Island," New York Times, Oct. 18, 1929.
  • "Charles Lucania told police how he lived up to his name 'Lucky,'" Lebanon PA Daily News, Oct. 17, 1929, p. 7.
  • "Charles Luciana, with aliases," FBI memorandum, file no. 39-2141-X, Aug. 28, 1935, p. 4.
  • "Chuck Lucania stabbed twice but survives," Miami FL News, Oct. 18, 1929, p. 22.
  • "Gangster 'taken for ride' lives to tell about it," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 17, 1929, p. 1.
  • "Gangster lives after 'taking ride,'" Syracuse Journal, Oct. 17, 1929, p. 1.
  • "Lucania is called shallow parasite," New York Times, June 19, 1936.
  • "Ride victim found with throat cut," New York Daily News, Oct. 17, 1929, p. 4.
  • "Ride victim who escaped locked up to save life," New York Daily News, Oct. 18, 1929, p. 4.
  • "Taken for ride and left 'dead,' gangster lives," Rochester NY Democrat and Chronicle, Oct. 18, 1929, p. 9.
  • Feder, Sid, and Joachim Joesten, The Luciano Story, New York: Da Capo Press, 1994 (originally published in 1954), p. 66-72.
  • Gosch, Martin A., and Richard Hammer, The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1975, p. 115-120.
  • Turkus, Burton B., and Sid Feder, Murder, Inc.: The Story of the Syndicate, New York: Da Capo Press, 1992 (originally published in 1951), p. 82.
  • Vizzini, Sal, with Oscar Fraley and Marshall Smith, Vizzini: The Story of America's No, 1 Undercover Narcotics Agent, New York: Pinnacle, 1972, p. 158-159.

06 October 2018

'Schatz' follows Yale to wealth, influence, grave

On this date in 1928...

New York Daily News
 Michael "Mike Schatz" Abbatemarco, a top lieutenant in Frankie Yale's Brooklyn organization, was found dead, slumped behind the wheel of his still-running automobile at 4:15 a.m. on Oct. 6, 1928. The car was parked in front of 2421 Eighty-Third Street in a residential section of Gravesend, Brooklyn. Abbatemarco, thirty-four-year-old underworld ruler of the Gowanus area, had been shot in the forehead, neck, right cheek and chest.

Abbatemarco's wealth and underworld influence appeared to dramatically increase following the death of his boss, Yale, in July. Some believed that Mike Schatz held a monopoly on area beer sales. During the summer, Abbatemarco purchased his flashy new automobile and moved from 321 First Street in Brooklyn to 38 Seventy-Ninth Street, a two-story yellow brick building in the borough's Bay Ridge section.

Abbatemarco
The night before his death, Abbatemarco played poker with friends at a Gowanus coffeehouse, Union Street and Fourth Avenue. His buddy Jamie Cardello reportedly walked him to his car after the game at about 3 a.m. Some suggested that Abbatemarco was accompanied by a gangster named Ralph "the Captain" Sprizza. (Sprizza was later charged with participating in the Abbatemarco murder.)

A Brooklynite named Jack Simon observed the parked Abbatemarco coupe while walking to work through the area. Simon told police he soon heard gunshots from that direction and saw a man get out of the car and trot through a vacant lot toward Eighty-Fourth Street. Police later found a discarded handgun in the lot.

Abbatemarco's funeral was said to be nearly as spectacular as that of his former boss, despite widow Tessie Abbatemarco's efforts to keep the ceremony more subdued. His coffin was encased in silvered bronze. The cortege included more than one hundred cars and fourteen cars of floral offerings. A large tower of roses topped by a fluttering dove was sent by Anthony "Little Augie Pisano" Carfano, a top lieutenant to Manhattan Mafia boss Giuseppe Masseria and Masseria's choice as Yale's successor in Brooklyn. Carfano did not personally attend. A military honor guard - eight riflemen from the Eighteenth Infantry at Fort Hamilton - took part in the funeral due to Abbatemarco's military service during the Great War.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle
 Following Abbatemarco's death, members of his underworld organization. including his brother Frank, nephew Anthony and relative Joseph Magnasco, merged into the Profaci Crime Family, forming the President Street-Carroll Street crew that later gave rise to the rebellious Gallo brothers.

See also: Michael Abbatemarco biography.

Sources:

  • "Beer racket clue at Philadelphia in gang slaying," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 8, 1928, p. 1.
  • "Funeral of racketeer quiet as widow overrules gang's wish for brilliant show," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 10, 1928, p. 1.
  • "Gang chief burial with police army," New York Daily News, Oct. 10, 1928, p. Brk-5.
  • “Gang chief buried with honor guard,” New York Evening Post, Oct. 10, 1928, p. 1.
  • "Gold digger clew in gang death," New York Daily News, Oct. 8, 1928, p. 13.
  •  “Throng at funeral of slain Uale aide,” New York Times, Oct. 11, 1928.
  • “Uale friend slain in car as he sits at driving wheel,” Brooklyn Standard Union, Oct. 6, 1928, p. 1.
  • “Uale gang leader slain like his chief,” New York Times, Oct. 7, 1928, p. 1.
  • "Uale's successor slain in auto by lone gunman, jealousy in gang hinted," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Oct. 6, 1928, p. 1.
  • Daniell, F. Raymond, “Yale successor slain near place where chief died,” New York Evening Post, Oct. 6, 1928, p. 1.
  • Meffore, Arthur, "Yale beer gangster slain," New York Daily News, Oct. 7, 1928, p. 2.

Murdered at McD's

Sylvester "Sally Daz" Zottola, 71, was shot and killed Thursday, Oct. 4, 2018, while waiting at a McDonald's drive-thru lane in the Bronx. Zottola, a reputed associate of the Bonanno Crime Family and once a trusted friend of former Bonanno boss Vincent J. "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano, apparently had been targeted by rivals for the past year.

Zottola, alone in his SUV, visited the McDonald's restaurant drive-thru, on the 1600 Block of Webster Avenue near Belmont Street in the Claremont section of the Bronx, at about 4:45 p.m. and placed an order for a medium coffee. He was boxed in, a car in front of him and a car behind him, when a gunman in a dark hoodie stepped up to his vehicle and fired at him six times with a 9mm handgun. One slug struck Zottola in the head, three entered his chest, one hit him in the shoulder. Zottola was unarmed at the time.

The gunman approached through a hole in a fence along Clay Avenue behind the McDonald's property and walked down an embankment to the drive-thru lane. After the shooting, he went back up the embankment, through the fence and into a waiting gray sedan. The car sped away southward on Clay Avenue.

Zottola was pronounced dead at the scene, concluding a series of attempts on his life that date back at least to September 2017...

Read more at Mafiahistory.us.

04 October 2018

Pals' pistols quiet garrulous gangster

On this date in 1951...

Asbury Park NJ Press
Guarino "Willie Moore" Moretti, 57, was shot to death, Oct. 4, 1951, at Joe's Restaurant, 793 Palisade Avenue, Cliffside Park, New Jersey. The murder brought to an end the career of a powerful Mafia leader. Once a trusted friend of bosses Frank Costello, Stefano Magaddino, Charlie Luciano and others, Moretti lately had become a liability to his organization.

His killers, described as four middle-aged men, chatted and joked in a friendly manner at a restaurant table with Moretti for a short time before taking his life by firing two .38-caliber bullets into the back of his head.

New York Daily News


State and federal authorities learned that Moretti had been killed on orders from Mob chieftains because he was no longer in full control of his faculties and was talking too much. Moretti had been garrulous during a recent appearance before the Senate's Kefauver Committee and was scheduled to soon testify before a special New Jersey grand jury investigating gambling.

The Kefauver Committee obtained evidence that Frank Costello sent Moretti under guard to California a few years earlier because he could not control his tongue.

Legends

Moretti is associated with a number of underworld legends. He is said to have assisted young Frank Sinatra in 1938, when the singer was accused of seducing and impregnating an unmarried young woman.

Moretti was rumored to have arranged for the woman to become married and for charges against Sinatra to be dropped. Moretti reportedly supported Sinatra's career and convinced band leader Tommy Dorsey in 1942 to let Sinatra out of a restrictive contract. Comic entertainer Jerry Lewis recalled the legend in a 2005 book:

Now, the story goes - I wasn't there, so I can't confirm it - that Mr. Moretti put a gun in Mr. Dorsey's mouth and politely asked him to release Mr. Sinatra from his contract. Which (the legend goes) Dorsey promptly sold to Willie for one dollar.

New York Daily News

A few years later, when newspapers reported that Sinatra was separating from his wife, Moretti became involved. The Mafioso sent a telegram expressing surprise at the news and instructing, "Remember you have a decent wife and children. You should be very happy."

Movie comedian Lou Costello, a native of Paterson, New Jersey, also had a connection with Moretti. The FBI reported that in the fall of 1946 Costello asked Moretti to "take care of" a man who was "making a play" for Costello's wife. Moretti had a colleague in Los Angeles handle the matter and assured Costello that he would have no further trouble.

Late in 1946, Moretti was among the Mafiosi - including Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, the Fischetti brothers, Gerry Catena and Vincent Mangano - who traveled to Havana, Cuba, to meet with Charlie Luciano, who was trying to reestablish himself in the western hemisphere after being deported from the U.S. to Italy.

Neighborhood

Joe's Restaurant, also known by the name Joe's Elbow Room, became a hang out for Moretti and his underworld associates following the closing of Duke's Restaurant a few doors away. Joe's stood facing the entrance of the popular Palisades Amusement Park (now home to high-rise apartment buildings).

The area, just across the George Washington Bridge from western Manhattan, was home to a number of powerful Mafiosi. Albert Anastasia resided just a few blocks from Joe's Restaurant. Giuseppe "Joe Adonis" Doto lived close by in Fort Lee. Paul Palmeri, who like Moretti was a former member of Magaddino's crime family in western New York, lived in Passaic.

An early Mafia boss of bosses, Giuseppe Morello, also lived in the area - 1115 Arcadian Way in Fort Lee - before his murder in 1930.

Moretti's car stands outside Joe's Restaurant (New York Daily News).