19 Purchase Street Read online

  The transition that followed took many months but was surprisingly tolerable for the bosses. They would never be obliged totally to adjust to being subservient because their arrangement with the High Board was so improbable, so invisible that their noses would never be publicly rubbed in it. As for the money, they wouldn’t miss it except in their minds. Actually, there was too much money. Ten percent would still be more than enough. They were still the bosses. They would still stir up a current of fear and a wake of relief wherever they went.

  The strategy of the High Board was to keep itself as removed as possible. It would remain where it was, innocent and dignified, while it pushed the criminal element even further out into the limelight.

  A perverse public relations campaign.

  Its purpose was to instill the public with the idea that there was such a thing as the Mafia. Believe in it like a faith. A perfect diversionary front.

  The campaign got underway in 1950 with the Special Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime. Senator Estes Kefauver led the committee, but it was the High Board that set it up.

  There had never been anything like it. Television cameras captured everyone, banks of lights increased the sweat. There in black and white, in the actual moving flesh, was crime. Costello, Anastasia, Profaci, Scalice, Adonis, and whoever else might play well.

  The senators knew a certain line they were not to exceed.

  The witnesses testified with self-incriminating vagueness.

  The audience was convinced that crime was indeed organized in some intricate, evil way called the Mafia and that these men were head and heart of it.

  It never occurred to anyone that they were really the foot.

  Those hearings were also used by the High Board to shake up the bosses, show them the sort of pressure that could be brought to bear.

  There were six hundred subpoenas.

  Over a year of probing.

  But not one conviction.

  The bosses were made to understand they could thank those on the High Board (whoever they were) for that.

  From then on the campaign to promote the Mafia fed itself with nearly every crime that was committed. There seemed always to be some piece of Mafia melodrama for newspapers and television to make the most of it. If things got quiet, the High Board saw that they were stirred up.

  On June 17, 1957, the High Board had Frank Scalice murdered.

  The blame went to Albert Anastasia.

  On October 25, same year, it had Albert Anastasia murdered.

  Who would believe Carlo Gambino when he said he’d had nothing to do with it.

  The bosses realized who was in truth responsible. It made them very nervous. They decided to try to help themselves with a conference. They took extreme care to keep their meeting secret, passed the word only from privileged mouth to privileged ear and chose the most unlikely out of the way place for it. A little hill town in northern New York State called Appalachin, at the remote home of Joseph Barbara, who was suitably a remote fellow.

  All the bosses showed up, from every part of the country. Although they arrived in thirty-four black limousines, when just one in that rural area would have been out of place, it appeared as though they had pulled it off. Possibly they could combine their intimidations, transform them into resistance. They were fed up with having a knee on their necks.

  They had hardly had a chance to light a cigar when the hand of the High Board descended on them. In the persons of a dozen New York State Troopers. The High Board had known of the meeting from the start, had only allowed such conniving so it could take advantage of it.

  The bosses reacted like naughty children caught.

  They ran.

  Mainly for the woods, which was, of course, out of their element. Branches switched them, poked at their faces, seemed to be trying for their eyes. Fallen leaves tricked them, made the footing appear solid while the humus beneath was so damp and giving they went in over the tops of their delicate shoes, soiling their silk socks. The woods multiplied their desperation. They lost hats, sunglasses, jacket buttons and one another as they ran.

  It was humiliating for the bosses. They felt less effective than ever. Self-consciously they retreated to their respective territories and let it be known they did not want to hear a word about it, not another word.

  NEWSPAPERS and television made as much as they could of the Appalachin meeting. It would go down as a milestone. However, no one dug into it enough to question whether or not the State Police were really what had caused all those top Italian tough guys to run as though for their lives. Many of them had stood up to grand juries without a qualm. They weren’t breaking any law by just being there, nor were they wanted men trying to avoid capture. So, why hadn’t they stayed in place, thanked the police for looking in and gotten on with business? Obvious questions, but never asked. Instead, the angle that got played up was these men had gathered at Appalachin to take part in secret Mafia rituals. And to accept Don Vitrone Genovese as the capo di tutti capi, boss of all bosses.

  Those reasons for the Appalachin meeting were verified a few years later by Joseph Valacchi.

  The informer, Valacchi.

  He wasn’t created from scratch by the High Board, but he was its product. The moment Valacchi let it be known that he was suffering with loose mouth, the High Board saw that he was properly used.

  Valacchi was never anything more than a knock-around guy, satisfied to be doing just this and that. His name had never once come from the mouth of any boss. So it was no wonder that when in 1963 he was transferred from Atlanta Federal Penitentiary to comfortable private quarters in the Westchester County Jail he felt immediately bigger.

  Valacchi enjoyed every minute of his importance. What the newspapers said he said made him sound as though he really knew, as though he had really been up there, and he liked making that impression. He would never admit words were put in his mouth. They were his words. He’d swear to it.

  When he testified in Washington before the Senate Rackets Investigating Committee and its chairman, Senator John McClellan of Arkansas (another in the continuing series of such dramas the High Board cooked up), it was Valacchi’s peak moment. For the occasion, he was dressed in a suit that was at least a hundred dollars better than any he’d ever had on. A pure silk tie that he knotted badly. He wanted a manicure but that was too much bother. A girl would have had to be brought in to do it, so they just promised the manicure to him right up to when there wasn’t time enough.

  There couldn’t have been anyone more convincing than Valacchi. He refused to see that all the time they had spent on him was rehearsal. Like a greedy actor, he took possession of the dialogue and the stage.

  A number of charts had been prepared for him. Like cue cards. Huge charts mounted with full face FBI and police photographs of the bosses and underbosses and everyone all the way down to the lowest soldier. The way Valacchi told it to the McClellan Committee, he knew them all, top to bottom, personally. Knew their records, habits, criminal specialties. He was a veritable archive of the Mafia. And, of course, it was all up there on the charts.

  No one doubted Valacchi. Because no one wanted to doubt Valacchi. There were no convictions as a result of him and the bosses never really offered to pay a hundred and fifty thousand to whoever killed him, as the newspapers reported. The bosses just squirmed some, soaked up the notoriety and truth be known, did not entirely dislike it.

  Valacchi was promised that he’d be kept in custody only as long as it took the commotion he’d caused to settle and smooth over. He would be given a new identity and, in other ways, be provided for. Meanwhile, he spent much of his time thinking up luxuries for his future. His keepers agreed to everything.

  On the morning of April 14, 1968, in his private quarters in the Federal Correctional Institute in LaMesa, Texas, Valacchi rolled up his shirt sleeve and received his weekly intravenous injection of vitamin B complex, which he believed he needed. The 50cc syringe contained vitamins and also live liver
cancer cells. Within three months Valacchi was dead.

  Costello also died.

  But of a natural cause, out of the limelight and far wealthier than any of his confederates knew.

  Winship had 16mm motion pictures made of Costello’s funeral. He viewed them alone in his study, his way of attending.

  All the old bosses were dead and gone.

  The underbosses stepped up, already conditioned, aware of what they should fear most and their accountability to the High Board. Not one of them had ever seen Winship, and the few who knew the name did not really believe it.

  The High Board never let up on them. Disobedient Carmine Galante met death sitting in the sun on July 1979 on the rear terrace of Jo and Mary’s Italian-American Restaurant in Brooklyn. Frank Tieri, at age seventy-six and suffering, had to endure being wheeled by two registered nurses into Federal District Court in November 1980 so, although too feeble to zip his own fly, he could be charged with being the most powerful of all. Tieri sat there in his sallow, age-spotted skin, his old dog eyes seeming to ask, “Why now?” The district attorneys chewed on him and fed him to the press day by day. Innocence was never a question. Actually, the proceedings were like a premature eulogy, reviewing the crimes of Tieri’s years as though they were accomplishments. Funzuola Tieri, age seventy-seven, IQ seventy-nine, died six months later. Attention was immediately shifted to one Aladena Frattiano, who claimed to have been forty years in the organization, an acting boss out west. According to Frattiano he chose to be a born again informant because he found out he was about to die. His deal with the government was that he receive suspended sentences for two confessed murders, thirty-five thousand dollars every year and all the other amenities of the federal witness protection program. However, if that was truly the arrangement why was Frattiano allowed to appear on television talk shows with such forthright brashness. Would he, trying for a safe profile, really flaunt his face while naming such names as Dragna, Buffaleno, Persico?

  The Mafia.

  It was essential to the High Board that whenever the public considered organized crime, it should think no further. To whatever extent the High Board went to cultivate and keep up that impression it was well worth it.

  Over the years, the income the High Board received from crime increased. There were those on the board who believed the original projections of profits were exaggerated. However, the money came in at a rate that exceeded even Winship’s expectations.

  Probably no group of men in the world were more capable of surreptitiously dealing with such enormous cash sums. They had both the financial knowledge and clout for it. Their banks were most useful. Three vast commercial banks with branches throughout the country where the various bosses and underbosses made regular cash deposits into accounts that existed solely for that purpose, accounts coded in such manner that they were automatically kept separate and never entered into the books at the end of any day.

  At regular intervals that cash was sent on to the main branches of those banks. The actual handling of it was not a problem. There was no need to be self-conscious about it. Who was to know which cash was which in all those bulging cloth bags transported apparently by Brinks or Wells Fargo trucks. As for holding the accumulated cash in the vaults, many millions were not discernible from other many millions. Besides, the traditional concern was a shortage, not a surplus.

  Bank examiners came in each year.

  From the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency or the Federal Reserve.

  The examiners usually spent a week poking into every column and corner, hardly speaking to anyone. It was assumed they were looking for discrepancies; actually they were making sure for the High Board that there were no loose ends. They seldom found one. When they did, they trimmed it off with their accounting expertise and tucked it cleanly into place.

  The dirty cash in the main vaults moved steadily from limbo. Some of it seeped into the bank’s regular excess reserve. And from there, out in the form of loans. (By 1982 the High Board held two hundred and twenty-five billion dollars in residential mortgages, one out of every five in America.)

  Some of the dirty cash was put into certain business accounts, where it showed as legitimate profit. Typical was a string of three hundred and twelve motion picture theaters in the midwest that, on the average, had about half its seats unsold but its income reflected capacity audiences. The same sort of cash take on a much larger scale was facilitated by two fast food chains with their thousands of outlets. And by service stations, amusement parks and supermarkets. The intention, obviously, was not to avoid paying taxes on the money, rather to place it in conduits where it would be taxed and thereby cleaned. (A legion of lawyers for the High Board were continually finding and opening such ways to accommodate the cash.)

  Wash.

  The most significant way the High Board pulled it off was with its strength on Wall Street. Never mind the laws that prohibited banks from dealing in or owning corporate stocks. The Banking Act of 1933. The Bank Holding Act of 1956. Both had such large holes in them they weren’t even a squeeze for the High Board. As well, whenever the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency happened to look in the High Board’s direction, they did so with such self-serving myopia, they saw only the impeccable foreground.

  Sizable chunks of the dirty money were regularly passed through the trust departments of the banks to be converted into stocks and other securities. The powerful investment banking houses owned by the High Board were in on it, especially Ivison-Weekes. They bought large blocks of issues, often from stock offerings they themselves packaged for important corporate clients.

  As the stock was acquired, it was registered to Hartco, Ninco, Vasco, Bostco or any of forty-some such entities. These were corporate code names, or street names, as they were called. For hiding behind. The real beneficial owner, of course, was the High Board, but there was less than a speck of a chance of anyone being able to determine that. A look beyond any of those front companies would find only another front, and beyond that, still another. Like the amusing futility of one of those hollow Spanish toy figures of wood that opened to reveal only a replica of itself, that in turn opened to reveal only a replica of itself, and so on, until what it got down to was nothing.

  The dirty money never stopped flowing in.

  Stock was continually bought with it.

  Not even a hesitation when it came to the law that limited an anonymous investor in a corporation to five percent. The High Board exceeded that amount in nearly every instance. Got around it by simply slicing its share into such portions and arranging for them to be owned by one or the other of its investment firms and certain individuals not apparently affiliated.

  By the early 1980s the High Board had its hold over many of the largest industrial corporations in America. Out of the leading five hundred in Fortune magazine’s directory, the High Board had fifty, was close to having fifty more, and none of those was very far down the list.

  This was what Winship had foreseen early on, that his eastern establishment accomplices had found so compelling.

  Not the profit so much as the control.

  Power over the being and well being of so many.

  Most people sensed it was there, over them, but they couldn’t say really what it was, or who. Something omnipresent but elusive in the upper reaches of the American system was moving their destinies more than they were led to believe. It was too vast to get one’s mind around.

  The High Board. By way of crime, seven hundred and fifty billion dollars had come into its system so far.

  It made the three billion at 19 Purchase Street seem a pittance.

  That house at Number 19 was a thread in the High Board’s tapestry. Important, but not vital. It served to take care of The Balance, whatever amounts of cash were left over from all the other ways of washing. The place had been set up for that particular purpose, and the way it should operate had been well thought out in advance. No need to devia
te from those ways, the High Board said. Nor was there margin for incompetence. An error would remain an error, despite excuse. It was to be understood.

  Edwin L. Darrow, the Custodian of Number 19, was well aware of the High Board’s inflexibility. It was something he tried to keep in mind. He did not believe the fatal heart attack of Gridley, the man who had been Custodian before him. No one seemed to know exactly how much of a mistake Gridley made, but rumor had it in the neighborhood of a hundred million.

  Darrow begrudged Gridley’s death. Believed it had impeded him. If not for it, by now he, Darrow, would have been at least a director of one of the High Board’s conglomerates. Out in the public sun, basking in philanthropy, Penobscot Bay, Palm Beach and America’s Cup. That had been his direction until Gridley’s heart attack and he was told to take over at Number 19. It wasn’t at all what he wanted, being on the shady underside. It required too low a profile and relatively modest lifestyle.

  Temporary, they had said.

  But now, eleven years later, there he was. With his nephew Arnold Hine. Making his daily visit to those two upper rooms where The Balance was kept.

  He told Hine firmly now: “We’ll have none of that.”

  “What?”

  “You know the rule against having food up here.” He indicated two cartons of groceries set aside on the floor.

  “They’re not just groceries, they’re a bring. One of the security men found them this morning down by the gate.”

  “I know all about that. I’m talking about eating up here.” From one of the cartons, he took up a tin of Carr’s wheatmeal biscuits. Its lid was on crooked and half its contents was gone. He showed it to Hine and then, to reinforce his case, brushed some crumbs from the nearby counter surface.

  Hine glanced at the man who looked like a gardener, and the two women dressed as housekeepers. They were pretending total concentration on their work. Hine thought they had probably eaten at least one biscuit each. And Sweet had eaten the rest. It wouldn’t do any good to mention it to Sweet. It was just his way.