Caught in Cleveland

On this date in 1928, Cleveland police discovered a convention of U.S. Mafiosi at the Hotel Statler on Euclid Avenue and East 12th Street. 

Scores of detectives and uniformed police officers quickly surrounded the hotel and raided rooms occupied by out-of-town visitors with Italian-sounding names. Twenty-three men were arrested as suspicious persons. Eighteen of them were found to be armed. Among the suspects were known crime figures from Chicago, New York, Buffalo, Tampa and St. Louis.

The sole representative of Buffalo was Salvatore "Sam" DiCarlo. The youngest son of western New York's earliest known Mafia boss, at the time Sam DiCarlo was a trusted member of Stefano Magaddino's underworld organization.

Fourteen of the twenty-three arrested men were photographed by police as a group. Giuseppe Profaci is at center, seated in a wheelchair due to a recent accident. Sam DiCarlo of Buffalo stands behind him. Joseph Magliocco is to the right of DiCarlo. Pasqualino Lolordo of Chicago is seated to the right of Profaci.

The others arrested on December 5, 1928, were Pasqualino Lolordo, Giuseppe Giunta, Frank Alo, Tony Bella, Emanuele Cammarata, James Intravia, Sam Oliveri and Giuseppe Sacco from Chicago;  Giuseppe Profaci, Giuseppe Magliocco, Vincenzo Mangano, Giuseppe Traina, Andrea Lombardino, Salvatore Lombardino, Giuseppe Palermo and Michael Russo from New York and New Jersey; Ignazio Italiano and Giuseppe Vaglica from Tampa; Giovanni Mirabella and Calogero SanFilippo from St. Louis; Paul Palazzola of Gary, Indiana; and Sam Tilocco of Cleveland. (The suspects gave various stories to explain their presence in Cleveland. Officials accepted only the tales told by Mangano and Traina, and those two Mafia leaders were quickly released. The rest were interrogated by police and immigration officials and then arraigned.)

Portsmouth OH Daily Times, Dec. 5, 1928.

Police expressed their certainty that other organized criminals were staying elsewhere in the city. Rumors indicated that Chicago's Al Capone had been seen in the area.

Local authorities believed they had broken up a meeting called to settle feuds over Prohibition Era corn sugar, a necessary commodity for moonshining operations. They were mistaken. The bloody corn-sugar wars of the Cleveland underworld already had been resolved.

Some historians have suggested, quite wrongly, that the Cleveland gathering was the first formative convention of the U.S. Mafia (a number of writers have referred to the criminal society as the "Unione Siciliana"). Actually, a national Mafia network had been in place for many years, and meetings of Mafiosi occurred fairly regularly.

Masseria

Other explanations have been offered. Some say that the convention was called to reallocate underworld rackets following recent gangland assassinations, to resolve underworld disagreements in Chicago or to recognize the ascension of Profaci to the rank of family boss. However, local or regional issues would not warrant the calling of a national convention. It appears far more likely that the convention's purpose was to recognize the U.S. Mafia's new boss of bosses Giuseppe Masseria.

At war with reigning boss of bosses Salvatore "Toto" D'Aquila since the dawn of the Prohibition Era, Masseria had assembled the strongest and wealthiest crime family in the country. The recent murder of D'Aquila on a Manhattan street left Masseria's appointment as boss of bosses a mere formality. Though Masseria's own home base was in New York City, many of his kin resided in Cleveland, and Masseria allies in Cleveland had recently defeated a pro-D'Aquila faction there. The city would have been an entirely appropriate selection for a Masseria coronation.

Critics of this view note that Masseria and his allies were not among those taken into custody at the Hotel Statler. Of course, with much of his family in the area, there would have been no reason for Masseria to stay at any hotel. And police publicly expressed their disappointment that the hasty raid at the Statler allowed other conventioneers to get away.

Read more about the 1928 Mafia convention in Cleveland and other Cleveland underworld events in:

• DiCarlo: Buffalo's First Family of Crime by Thomas Hunt and Michael A. Tona.
• January 2010 issue of the Informer journal.

Bad day for big shots

Several high-profile U.S. organized crime leaders and one suspected Mafia informant were murdered on this date, November 4. 

New York Daily News

1928 - Underworld chief Arnold Rothstein was shot and mortally wounded in Manhattan's Park Central Hotel. A hotel employee discovered the collapsed Rothstein inside the Park Central's Fifty-Sixth Street service entrance. The renowned gambler / racketeer / narcotics importer was taken to Polyclinic Hospital, where surgeons attempted to repair damage to his lower abdomen caused by a .38-caliber bullet. Rothstein died two days later. The path of the bullet, determined at autopsy, indicated that Rothstein was seated at the time the fatal shot was fired by someone standing to his right. The slug penetrated his bladder and intestines and resulted in death-causing sepsis. Authorities believed that Rothstein cardgame losses, reaching into hundreds of thousands of dollars, were related to his murder. Rothstein also was said to have been planning a divorce and had recently been rewriting his will.

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Evidence of lingering hostility: Bioff's garage, Nov. 4, 1955.

1955 - Willie Bioff became well known across the U.S. in the 1940s, as a Chicago Outfit scheme to control motion picture industry unions and extort vast sums from movie companies came to light. Bioff, a Chicago native who relocated to southern California, was a central figure in the scheme. Following Bioff's arrest, he betrayed his underworld colleagues and provided investigators with sufficient evidence to cause the apparent suicide of Outfit leader Frank Nitti (formerly a Bioff friend and defender) and the successful prosecutions of other Chicago bosses. A decade later, all the unpleasantness seemed forgotten. Bioff and his wife were living under assumed names (Mr. and Mrs. William Nelson) in Phoenix, Arizona, and Chicago bosses had served their prison and probation terms. Evidence of some lingering hostility was seen on the morning of Nov. 4, 1955: Bioff climbed into his pickup truck inside his home garage. As he stepped on the starter, an explosion suddenly shook the neighborhood. The New York Times wrote: "The blast threw Bioff twenty-five feet and scattered wreckage over a radius of several hundred. It left only the twisted frame, the motor and the truck wheels. The garage door was blown out, the roof shattered and windows in the Bioff home and several neighboring houses were broken. Jagged chunks of metals tore holes in the wall of a home 100 feet away. The blast rattled windows a mile away." Bioff's body, minus both legs and a right hand, were found 25 feet from the explosion.

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Brooklyn Daily Eagle

1959 - Frank Abbatemarco, who ran a lucrative numbers racket for the Profaci Crime Family of Brooklyn, stopped in at a tavern run by friend Anthony Cardello. Near eight o'clock in the evening, Abbatemarco stepped outside of the tavern and was greeted by two gunmen, whose identities were masked by fedoras pulled down low on their heads and scarves covering their faces. Abbatemarco shouted, "No, no!" but the gunmen opened fire anyway. Wounded, Abbatemarco rushed back into the tavern. The gunmen pursued and methodically pumped bullets into the underworld big shot. They then turned casually and walked out. It became widely accepted that Abbatemarco was killed by his own underlings - members of the Gallo Gang - under orders from Profaci. In the wake of the murder, the Gallos, perhaps unsatisfied with the way Abbatemarco racket assets were divided, broke away from Profaci.

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NY Daily News

Also on this date: In 1922, Francesco Puma, a member of the Stefano Magaddino-run Castellammarese criminal organization known as The Good Killers, was murdered during a walk around his East Twelfth Street, Manhattan, neighborhood. A number of shots were fired at and into Puma from behind. He drew a handgun and spun around, only to meet the knife-blade of a closer assassin. With a stab wound in his abdomen and gunshot wounds to his chest, stomach and right wrist, Puma fell to the sidewalk. He succumbed to his wounds later at Bellevue Hospital. Press accounts of his death revealed suspicion that Puma had been providing authorities with information about the U.S. Mafia.

See also:

• Evidence of some lingering hostility (Writers of Wrongs)
• Frank Abbatemarco biography (mafiahistory.us)
• The Good Killers: 1921's Glimpse of the Mafia (mafiahistory.us) 
• DiCarlo: Buffalo's First Family of Crime, Vol I.