Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia by John Dickie

Author:John Dickie [Dickie, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2007-03-07T23:00:00+00:00

Prohibition meant bootlegging, and bootlegging brought the toughest and brightest of the multi-ethnic youth gang members to the fore. Viewed from a broader perspective than was available to Nick Gentile, Prohibition crime is not exclusively an Italian-American affair. Nevertheless, with the exception of a few veterans, the most famous Italian-American bootleggers and gangsters of the 1920s and early 1930s were young and had been born or brought up in the United States. Their rise coincided with the Italianization and Americanization of the mafia.

Salvatore Lucania hailed from the sulphur town of Lercara Friddi. He left Sicily at the age of nine in 1905. When he grew up he could only speak a few stumbling words of his native dialect. At eighteen he was found guilty of his first serious offence: unlawful possession of narcotics – he was both user and pusher. Prohibition made him into one of the most famous American mobsters of them all. He is better known as Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. Both his nickname and the disconcertingly large scars around his neck date from the occasion when he was slashed and left for dead by some early rivals. From the outset Luciano mixed easily with felons from other backgrounds, working very closely with men like Meyer ‘Little Man’ Lansky, for example.

Francesco Castiglia, known as Frank Costello – one of Luciano’s associates – was another example. He was born near Cosenza in the ‘toe’ of mainland Italy in 1891; the mafia in Sicily has never recruited from that region. Costello’s family brought him to East Harlem when he was four. His first brush with the law – for assault and robbery in 1908 – did not lead to a conviction because it was his first offence. In 1914, he was sentenced to a year in jail for carrying a concealed weapon. On his release he married a non-Italian and embarked on a criminal career based around cosy relations with politicians. With his business partner Henry Horowitz, he started up the Horowitz Novelty Company to produce kewpie dolls, razor blades – and gambling paraphernalia. He would become the king of New York’s slot machines.

The most famous gangster of them all, Al Capone, was also a case in point. Born in Williamsburg of Neapolitan parents, he was a member of the Five Points gang – as Luciano had been – before he moved to Chicago as a gunman, rising to the summit of the city’s underworld in the mid-1920s. His Chicago syndicate contained Italians but also men like Murray ‘the Camel’ Humphreys and Sam ‘Golf Bag’ Hunt. (The American underworld may not be as darkly fascinating as the Sicilian version, but it does produce quirkier nicknames.) Capone’s womanizing and greed for publicity would have been anathema to mafiosi back in Sicily.

As a businessman, Capone was more of a networker than the ‘managing director’ of crime imagined by many feature films about his life. His method was to make case-by-case 50/50 deals with men like truck dealer Louis Lipschultz, for liquor distribution. Or with Frankie Pope to manage the Hawthorne Smoke Shop gambling den.

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