Top Hoodlum by Anthony M. DeStefano

Author:Anthony M. DeStefano [DeStefano, Anthony M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2018-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“I NEVER STOLE A NICKEL IN MY LIFE”

THE STORY, TOLD MANY TIMES about Frank Costello’s political influence, related back to 1932 and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was there, according to George Wolf, that his client entertained delegates in and around the Drake Hotel to work to assure the nomination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the party’s presidential candidate. The political wheeling and dealing was just like back home in New York.

“Here in Chicago, what did it turn out to be?” said Wolf. “Guys running up and down hotel corridors day and night trading votes and offering jobs and threatening political revenge just like little old Tammany Hall.”

In that case, Costello was very familiar with the machinations of Tammany Hall. After all, he was there in Chicago with none other than Jimmy Hines, the leader of Tammany. Their candidate Roosevelt secured the nomination and went on to win the 1932 Presidential election. All the boozing and schmoozing had paid off. Just to hedge its bets, other branches of Tammany backed Roosevelt’s main rival Al Smith—just in case.

The story of how Costello became intertwined with Tammany and its power is one of the great mob stories of the era. In a town so solidly Democratic for decades, Tammany controlled government, the court, and cops. Public officials who sought office had to please the leaders of the organization and protect its interests. It was a culture of corruption with payoffs all around. It all seemed so appropriate. Everybody got a taste, and the criminals—on the street and in City Hall—were happy. It wasn’t “honest graft,” the kind George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany orator, said was okay because it never hurt anybody. “I seen my opportunities and I took them,” was how Plunkitt rationalized lining his bank account. No, these were the kinds of alliances that created the nefarious banks of another sort, the favor banks where politicians were promised support and money if they laid off the criminals and allowed them to go about their illegal businesses.

Costello had known that it paid to have political connections growing up in East Harlem. He was aware of how Giousue Gallucci, the onetime boss of Little Italy during Costello’s youth, had added to his reputation on the street by being involved with politicians. He was seen as a man of influence with officialdom, as well as a chief criminal boss of the area surrounding 108th Street—as long as he was able to duck the assassin’s bullet. It was unclear when exactly Costello got involved with the Democratic party. But it appears that at some point he became part of an organization known as The Tough Club, a Tammany organization on the West Side.

The relationship between the mob and Tammany was one that seemed to be shaped by the reality of their separate worlds. While Tammany was once a power with a great deal of financial resources, that had waned in the 1920s and 1930s. La Guardia had made merit selection for jobs a bedrock of his administration, thus undercutting the patronage Tammany was able to trade upon.

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