Can't name the five families? Turn in your MetroCard, or sign up for at lest an online subscription (online and print is better) to the New York Times, because mob reporting is back. By the way, the five crime families are: Bonanno, Lucchese, Gambino, Genovese and Colombo.
I became aware of the trend with yesterday's story that defendants in a mob trial, John Zancocchio and Joseph Cammarano Jr. were being portrayed by their legal team as victims of prosecutorial stereotyping, alleging they were on trial because they were, well, Italian, and talked with their hands.
Anyone who knows anything about the names of the crime families knows that no one at the helm is named after the founding godfathers. Like a prestigious white shoe law firm, there is no original partner named Millbank, Tweed, Hadley or McCloy at Millbank when you get off the elevator. But they soldier on regardless.
Take the two defendants named in the current trial. They are alleged to be members of The Bonanno family, with Mr. Cammarano in control as the boss. It is not known if the family stationery is ever revised. Mr Zancocchio is considered the consigliere, or adviser.
In this weekend's WSJ, the columnist Ben Zimmer gives the word consigliere the William Safire treatment and discusses its origins in language and where we've been reading and hearing the term in books and movies, principally 'The Godfather,' which introduced us to Robert Duvall playing Tom Hagen—very much a non Sicilian—as the consigliere to Marlon Brando's Don Corleone. The simplest definition of consigliere and shorn of adjectives is counselor.
And then we have today's paper, with the blockbuster front page, below the fold with photo, obituary for Carmine J. Persico, 'Teenage Hit Man Who Rose to a Mob Throne,' who died in prison at 85 while serving a 139-year sentence. The color photo of Mr. Persico is from 1986 and bears a strong, baggy-eyed resemblance to New York's former Governor Mario M. Cuomo.
The NYT has been putting more obituaries on the front page when the editors at the afternoon meeting agree that someone who has passed away merits a good deal of acknowledgement, no matter what their deeds.
Mr. Persico is not the first crime boss to achieve a front page sendoff. The more well-known and flamboyant John Gotti got a front page notice in June 2002 when he passed away in prison. Both obituaries were written by Selwyn Raab, a retired NYT investigative reporter whose specialty was crime and crime families.
Mr. Raab wrote about NYC crime so long ago that his reporting on the 1963 Janice Wylie, Emily-Hoffert murders was turned into a TV movie, 'The Marcus-Nelson' murders that morphed into 'Kojack,' starring of course the lollipop sucking, Greek detective played by, 'who loves you baby,' Telly Savalas. Mr. Raab's name would appear on the 'Kojack' credits, and at 85 Mr. Raab is still with us.
I remember the reporting on the Wiley-Hoffert murders in the '60s and believe it or not, it led people to realize they shouldn't keep their windows open by the fire escape when they were sleeping, even though the girls' apartment was on the third floor with no reported fire escape access. Though the nine-story building had a doorman on duty until midnight, the eventually identified and convicted perpetrator, Richard Robles, was a junkie burglar who had committed over a 100 burglaries and had gained access through an open kitchen window. He was described as a cat burglar, who thought the apartment was empty.
New York was always a edgy place to live, but now it was felt to be unsafe to keep a fire escape window open for some night air. And sleeping on the fire escape was even more dangerous. Air conditioning wasn't as prevalent then. When asked, "what were the '60s like?" I've always said, "the '60s were hot!"
The front page obit for Mr. Persico jumps to page A18 and a nearly full two-page spread, with photos. It is a sizable obit by any standards, and its length approaches that we usually see reserved for astronauts, actors, and Russian writers. The notorious seldom get a 21-gun sendoff.
The photos in the rest of the obit are black and white, mostly because newspaper photos of the era were always black and white. Color is a far more recent innovation.
I love one photo that shows Mr. Persico and his body guard, Hugh (Apples) McIntosh, leaving a social club (members only). Mr. McIntosh is described as being 6'4" with a frame like a tree trunk, alongside the much smaller 5'6" Carmine. There are appropriately or not three garbage cans in the photo as well.
The three cans are of the ribbed, steel variety, trimmed at the top with a band of iron, that were heavy as hell to lift even when they were empty. The three lids are secured to each each other by a length of wire or rope. One can is significantly overflowing, but still with a lid balanced on top.
The lids would be popped off the cans by the sanitation men grabbing the rope, or wire. The cans would then be dragged to the truck, lifted and tilted with the contents dumped into the back of the truck.
In January 1968, when NYC went through another one of Mayor John Lindsey's municipal workers' strikes, the sanitation workers walked off the job. This left nine days of trash on the city's sidewalks that went uncollected until the strike was settled. Governor Rockefeller wouldn't declare a state of emergency and call out the National Guard to collect the garbage on the premise that the guardsmen were not in good enough shape to be NYC sanitation workers. They weren't deemed strong enough to "lift that bale." Luckily, it was a cold January, and the trash didn't ferment on the city's sidewalks in the heat. An all-out health hazard was avoided by the cold weather.
Mr. Persico was first arrested at 17 for murder, and became a "made" mob member at 21—an unusually young age. No one issued mob trading cards like baseball, so there is no highly valued rookie card in existence.
He was considered highly intelligent, and despite being a high school dropout he did get judges to allow his self-defense at some of his trials. His grasp of legal concepts and strategies was considered highly formed and was perhaps acquired growing up when his father, Carmine Sr. was employed as a legal stenographer at Manhattan law firms.
In reading Carmine's obit, I find out I live in the same suburb Carmine was holed up in when he was grassed out by his cousin's husband for a $50,000 reward in 1985, a bit before we moved here. I'm not aware of any civic pride that is displayed as our being a hamlet that housed Mr. Persico as he attempted to evade arrest. I also never met the husband who got the reward. He might not have lived long enough to spend much of it.
The '60s and '70s was the era of the Gallo-Profaci gang wars and a 1962 incident might have made a chapter in Jimmy Breslin's 1969 book 'The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight' if it had happened a little later.
Turns out on August 20, 1961 a police sergeant walked into a Brooklyn bar and his presence interrupted two men who were in the process of depriving Larry Gallo of the ability to breathe by the process of tightening a rope around his neck. Sensing a member of the law was now present, the two assailants abandoned their oxygen deprivation of Mr. Gallo and ran out the door. One of the assailants was identified as Mr. Persico, but the charges were dropped when Mr. Gallo was unwilling to make a complaint. It is not reported what he told the police the two men were trying to do to him. Perhaps seeing how long he could hold his breath in order to be casted for a small part on a popular TV series of the era, 'Sea Hunt,' alongside Lloyd Bridges.
But do not for a nanosecond think that just because the mob seems to be aging out of existence with old guys passing away in Federal prison hospitals with IV drips in their arms that the colorful stories will ever leave us.
Perhaps not mob related, we do have the story out of Chicago of Jussie Smollett who tells us two guys were trying to wring his neck with a rope, but he got out of it.
The beat goes on. Only the names change,
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