See No Evil by Ron Felber

Author:Ron Felber
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781849545785
Publisher: Biteback Publishing

18

THE MAFIA AND HOOVER’S FBI

“More recent photos, held by Cohn were even more explicit depicting Hoover having sex with top FBI man Clyde Tolson.”

Suddenly and unexpectedly the pressure surrounding Elliot’s double life caught up with him, both physically and psychologically. While at the hospital, he was experiencing mind-numbing migraines that could only be sated by strong painkilling drugs like Darvon and Percocet, medications he would never in the past have considered taking. Worse, he was experiencing nightmares, odd and unsettling. In one, he was a child being pursued through his old Bronx neighborhood by implacable gangs of street thugs. In another, more subtle, and haunting, he felt as if he had spent an entire night locked in a room where objects kept shifting their positions, sometimes by no more than an inch or two, but nothing remained exactly in place.

There was no mistaking the meaning of these developments. Into Elliot’s life came a general sense that the foundations of the underworld were deteriorating, and that all he’d known before, even within the Gambino Family, was moving irreconcilably toward calamity He worried about his friends, Nick and Sal and Joey Ficshetti, who seemed to be riding an express train headed straight to hell so far as he could see. For one thing, they were doing cocaine as if it was going out of style. But worse, though Elliot never asked, he knew that Nicky had been secretly buying large quantities of raw cocaine and heroin with family funds then selling it through street contacts in the so-called “Black” or “Cuban Mafia” in Manhattan’s West Side and in Harlem.

It was one thing to do hard-core drugs as associates of any of the five families, which was a career-limiting decision, but the sale and distribution of hard-core drugs? That was a life-limiting decision because even though a blind eye was turned to massive deals occasionally made even by traditionalist godfathers like Carlo Gambino when the risk was small and profits incredible, the ironclad rule for capos, soldiers, and associates was that the dollars from junk weren’t worth the risk to the family, and breaches of that rule might well result in execution.

As early as 1947, during a full Commission meeting held on a yacht off the coast of Florida, the subject of narcotics was hotly debated between the traditionalist Sicilian members led by Joseph Bonanno and the Americanized liberal faction led by Lucky Luciano. Bonanno argued that like counterfeiting, drugs risked the possibility of federal intervention. Beyond that, as a traditionalist, he believed along with Vincent Mangano and Joe Profaci that the true Mafioso distanced himself from crimes like narcotics and prostitution while newer players like Luciano, influenced by Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, saw La Cosa Nostra mostly as a business enterprise where the huge profits in drug trafficking far outweighed the lingering attraction of worn-out Sicilian traditions.

In the end, it was the traditionalist who won out, and at that meeting, three key decisions were made. First, with Lucky in permanent exile, Frank Costello was formally named head of the Luciano Family.

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