Gangsters: Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13)

Mara Salvatrucha (commonly known as MS, Mara, and MS-13) is a transnational criminal gang that originated in Los Angeles and has spread to other parts of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America. The majority of the gang is ethnically composed of Central Americans.

In the U.S., the MS-13 has an especially heavy presence in Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California; the Washington, D.C. metropolitan areas of Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and Prince George’s County, Maryland; Long Island, New York; the Boston, Massachusetts area; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Houston, Texas. There is also a presence of MS-13 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Members of MS distinguish themselves by tattoos covering the body and also often the face, as well as the use of their own sign language.

They are notorious for their use of violence, and a moral subculture that predominantly consists of merciless revenge and cruel retribution.

Their wide-ranging activities have drawn the attention of the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who have initiated raids against known and suspected gang members – netting hundreds of arrests across the country.

Principal characters of the feature film “Sin Nombre” (2009) are members of MS in Chiapas, Mexico, and many of the traditions and practices of MS are depicted accurately (killings, tattoos, initiation, exploitation of migrants, etc.).

Video comes courtesy of YouTube:

That’s a slice of reel life.

Here’s the history:

Origins

The Mara Salvatrucha gang originated in Los Angeles, having its roots in El Salvador.

It was set up in the 1980s by Salvadoran immigrants in the city’s Pico-Union neighborhood who emigrated to the United States after the Central American civil wars of the 1980s.

Originally, the gang’s main purpose was to protect Salvadoran immigrants from other, more established gangs of Los Angeles, which were predominantly composed of Mexicans and African-Americans.

Some sources state the gang is named for La Mara, a street gang in San Salvador, and the Salvatrucha guerrillas who fought in the Salvadoran Civil War. Additionally, the word “mara” means gang in Caliche slang and is taken from marabunta, the name of a fierce type of ant.

“Salvatrucha” may be a combination of the words Salvadoran and “trucha”, a Caliche word for being alert. The term, “Salvatruchas” has been explained as a reference to Salvadoran peasants trained to become guerrilla fighters, referred to as the “Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.”

Gang Markings and Hand Signs

Many Mara Salvatrucha members cover themselves in tattoos. Common markings include “MS”, “Salvatrucha”, the “Devil Horns”, the name of their clique, and other symbols. A December 2007 CNN internet news article stated that the gang was moving away from the tattoos in an attempt to commit crimes without being noticed.

Members of Mara Salvatrucha (like members of most modern American gangs) utilize a system of hand signs for purposes of identification and communication. One of the most commonly displayed is the “devil’s head” which forms an ‘M’ when displayed upside down. This hand sign is similar to the symbol commonly seen displayed by heavy metal musicians and their fans. Founders of Mara Salvatrucha allegedly borrowed the hand sign after attending concerts of heavy metal bands.

Spread

Many Mara Salvatrucha gang members from the Los Angeles area have been deported after being arrested. Jose Abrego, a high-ranking member, was deported four times.

As a result of these deportations, members of MS have recruited more members in their home countries.

According to the 2009 National Gang Threat Assessment, “The gang is estimated to have 30,000 to 50,000 members and associate members worldwide, 8,000 to 10,000 of whom reside in the United States.”

In recent years the gang has expanded into the Washington, D.C. area. In particular, the areas of Langley Park and Takoma Park, Maryland, near the Washington border, have become centers of MS gang activity.

Counter-Measures

In 2004, the US FBI started the MS-13 National Gang Task Force. The FBI also began teaming with law enforcement in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico.

In 2005, the FBI helped create a National Gang Information Center and outlined a National Gang Strategy for Congress.

Also in 2005, the office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement started Operation Community Shield. By 2011, this operation had made over 20,000 arrests, including more than 3,000 arrests of alleged MS-13 members.

Illegal Immigration and People Smuggling

According to The Washington Times, MS “is thought to have established a major smuggling center” in Mexico. There were reports by the Minuteman Project that MS members were ordered to Arizona to target U.S. Border Patrol agents and Minuteman Project volunteers.

In 2005, Honduran Security Minister Oscar Alvarez and the President of El Salvador raised alarm by claiming that Muslim terrorist organization Al-Qaeda was meeting with Mara Salvatrucha and other Central American gangs to help them infiltrate the United States. FBI agents said that the U.S. intelligence community and governments of several Central American countries found there is no basis to believe that MS is connected to Al-Qaeda or other Islamic radicals, although Alvarez did visit Central America to discuss the issue.

On the southern border of Mexico, the gang has also unleashed violence against migrants.

Child Prostitution

In 2011, Alonso “Casper” Bruno Cornejo Ormeno, an associate of MS-13 from Fairfax, Virginia was sentenced to 292 months in prison for child prostitution. Ormeno recruited juvenile females into a prostitution ring by locating runaway children.

In June 2012, Rances Ulices Amaya of Springfield (a leader of MS-13) was sentenced to 50 years in prison for child prostitution. He was convicted in February 2012 for trafficking girls as young as 14 into a prostitution ring. They were lured from middle schools, high schools, and public shelters.

In September 2012, Yimmy Anthony Pineda Penado (also known as “Critico” and “Spike”) of Maryland, a former “clique leader” of MS-13, became the 11th MS-13 gang member to be convicted of child prostitution since 2011.

A Catalog of Crimes

On July 13, 2003, Brenda Paz, a 17-year-old former MS member turned informant, was found stabbed on the banks of the Shenandoah River in Virginia. Paz was killed for telling the FBI about Mara Salvatrucha’s criminal activities. Two of her former friends were later convicted of the murder.

On December 23, 2004, one of the most widely publicized MS crimes in Central America occurred in Chamelecón, Honduras when an intercity bus was intercepted and sprayed with automatic gunfire, killing 28 civilian passengers, most of whom were women and children.

MS organized the massacre as a protest against the Honduran government’s proposing a restoration of the death penalty in Honduras.

Six gunmen raked the bus with gunfire. As passengers screamed and ducked, another gunman climbed aboard and methodically executed passengers.

In February 2007, Juan Carlos Miranda Bueso and Darwin Alexis Ramírez were found guilty of several crimes, including murder and attempted murder. Ebert Anibal Rivera was also held over the attack, and was arrested after fleeing to Texas. Juan Bautista Jimenez, accused of masterminding the massacre, was killed in prison. According to the authorities, fellow MS-13 inmates hanged him. There was insufficient evidence to convict Óscar Fernando Mendoza and Wilson Geovany Gómez.

On May 13, 2006, Ernesto “Smokey” Miranda, a former high-ranking soldier and one of the founders of Mara Salvatrucha, was murdered at his home in El Salvador a few hours after declining to attend a party for a gang member who had just been released from prison. He had been studying law and working to keep children out of gangs.

In 2007, Julio Chavez allegedly murdered a man because he was wearing a red sweatshirt and was mistaken for a member of the Bloods gang.

On June 4, 2008, in Toronto, Ontario, police executed 22 search warrants, made 17 arrests and laid 63 charges following a five-month investigation.

On June 22, 2008, in San Francisco, California, a 21-year-old MS gang member, Edwin Ramos, shot and killed a father, Anthony Bologna, 48, and his two sons Michael, 20, and Matthew, 16, after their car briefly blocked Ramos from completing a left turn down a narrow street as they were returning home from a family barbecue.

On November 26, 2008, Jonathan Retana was convicted of the murder of Miguel Angel Deras, which the authorities linked to an MS initiation.

Fighting The Law

In 2008, the MS task force coordinated a series of arrests and crackdowns in the U.S. and Central America that involved more than 6,000 police officers in five countries. Seventy-three suspects were arrested in the U.S. In all, more than 650 suspects were taken into custody.

In February 2009, authorities in Colorado and California arrested 20 members of MS, and seized 10 pounds of methamphetamine, 2.3 kilograms (5 pounds) of cocaine, a small amount of heroin, 12 firearms and $3,300 in cash.

On November 4, 2009, El Salvadoran leaders of the MS-13 gang allegedly put out a contract on the federal agent responsible for a crackdown on its New York factions. The plot to assassinate the unidentified Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent was revealed in an arrest warrant for reputed gang member Walter (Duke) Torres.

Torres tipped authorities to the plan after he and four MS-13 members were stopped by NYPD detectives for hassling passersby on Northern Boulevard in Queens, New York. He was debriefed on October 22 at Rikers Island, where he was being held on a warrant issued in Virginia, according to court papers.

Torres said “the order for the murder came from gang leadership in El Salvador,” ICE agent Sean Sweeney wrote in an affidavit for a new warrant charging Torres with conspiracy.

Torres said he traveled to New York in August “for the specific purpose of participating in the planning and execution of the murder plot,” Sweeney wrote.

Gang members were trying to get their hands on a high-powered assault rifle, like an M-16, to penetrate the agent’s bulletproof vest.

Another MS-13 informant told authorities the agent was marked for death because the gang was “exceedingly angry” at him for arresting many members in the past three years, the affidavit states.

Federal prosecutors have indicted numerous MS-13 gang members on racketeering, extortion, prostitution, kidnapping, illegal immigration, money laundering, murder, people smuggling, arms trafficking, human trafficking and drug trafficking charges. The targeted special agent was the lead federal investigator on many of these federal cases.

Charlotte, North Carolina

In the early 2000s, US authorities investigated MS-13 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Eventually the work led to charges against 26 MS-13 members, including 7 trial convictions in January 2010, 18 guilty pleas, and 11 multi-year prison sentences.

Among these was the alleged first federal death-penalty conviction for an MS-13 member, Alejandro Enrique Ramirez Umaña, a.k.a. “Wizard” (age 25).

The Umaña Case

On July 27 2005, in Los Angeles, Umaña allegedly murdered Jose Herrera and Gustavo Porras and participated in the killing of Andy Abarca (September 28). He later came to Charlotte, North Carolina, according to witnesses, as a veteran member of MS-13, to reorganize the Charlotte cell of the gang.

According to witnesses at his later trial, on December 8, 2007, Umaña shot Ruben Garcia Salinas fatally in the chest and Manuel Garcia Salinas in the head, while in the Las Jarochitas, a family-run restaurant in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Witnesses testified that the shootings took place after the Garcia Salinas brothers had “disrespected” Umaña’s gang signs by calling them “fake”.

Firing three more shots in the restaurant (according to trial testimony), Umaña injured another individual with his gunfire.

Trial testimony and evidence showed that Umaña later fled back to Charlotte with MS-13 assistance. Umaña was arrested five days after that, in possession of the murder weapon. Additional evidence and testimony from the trial revealed that while Umaña was incarcerated awaiting trial he coordinated attempts to kill witnesses and informants.

Umaña was indicted by a federal grand jury on June 23, 2008.

During trial, he attempted to bring a knife with him to the courtroom, which was discovered by U.S. Marshals before Umaña was transported to the courthouse.

The murder was investigated by the Charlotte Safe Streets Task Force.

The court case was prosecuted by Chief Criminal Assistant U.S. Attorney Jill Westmoreland Rose of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina, and Trial Attorney Sam Nazzaro from the Criminal Division’s Gang Unit. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Don Gast and Adam Morris of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina were also members of the government’s trial team.

Charges included:

Murder in aid of the racketeering enterprise known as MS-13, two counts
Murder resulting from the use of a gun in a violent crime, two counts
Conspiracy to participate in racketeering
Witness tampering or intimidation, two counts
Possession of a firearm by an illegal alien
Extortion

On April 19, 2010, The jury convicted Umaña of all charges, and additionally found him responsible for the 2005 murders during the sentencing phase.

On April 28, a 12-person federal jury in Charlotte voted unanimously to impose the death penalty.

On July 27, 2010, Chief U.S. District Judge Robert J. Conrad, Jr., of Charlotte, NC, formally imposed the federal death penalty sentence.

The case was automatically appealed under Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

And the war goes on.

I have to be going, at this point.

Hope to see you, for our next story.

Till then.

Peace.

Gangsters: The Russian Mafia

The Russian Mafia (Russkaya Mafiya) is a term used to refer to the collective of various organized crime syndicates originating in the former Soviet Union. Most of the individual groups share similar goals and organizational structures that define them as part of a loose overall association.

They are also referred to as Bratva (Russian: “brotherhood”), Organizatsiya (Russian: “the organization”), or the Red Mafia (Russian: Krasnaya Mafiya).

After World War II, the death of Joseph Stalin, and the fall of the Soviet Union, gangs emerged in a flourishing black market, exploiting the unstable governments of the former Republics, and at their highest point, even controlling as much as two-thirds of the Russian economy.

In modern times, there are as many as 6,000 different groups, with more than 200 of them having a global reach.

However, the very existence of such groups has been the subject of some debate.

They naturally provide great fodder for the movies.

The 1994 film “Little Odessa”, featuring Tim Roth, Edward Furlong, Moira Kelly and Vanessa Redgrave, centers on the activities of the Russian Mafia in Brighton Beach, New York.

Video comes courtesy of YouTube:

That’s Hollywood.

Here’s some history:

Origins

The Russian Mafia – in the form of banditry and thievery – can be traced back to Russia’s imperial period, which began in the 1700s. Most of the population were poor peasants at the time, and criminals who stole from government entities and divided profits among the people earned Robin Hood-like status, being viewed as protectors, and folk heroes.

In time, the Vorovski Mir (Thieves’ World) emerged, as these criminals grouped together and started their own code of conduct that was based on strict loyalty to one another and opposition to the government.

When the Bolshevik Revolution occurred in 1917, the Thieves’ World was fully active. Vladimir Lenin attempted to wipe them out after being robbed by a gang of highwaymen, but the criminals survived into Joseph Stalin’s reign.

The Soviet Era

When Stalin seized power after the death of Lenin, he sought to crush the Thieves’ World, ordering the execution of thousands of criminals, and also his political opponents.

Millions of others were sent to gulags (Soviet labor camps), where powerful criminals worked their way up to become vory v zakone (“thieves-in-law”). These criminal elite often displayed their status through complicated tattoos – a practice that survives today, among Russian mobsters.

World War II

After Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, Stalin was desperate for more men to fight for the nation, offering prisoners freedom if they joined the army.

Many flocked to help out in the war, but this act betrayed the code of the Thieves’ World that one must not ally oneself with the government.

When the war was over, Stalin sent the released criminals back to prison.

The Bitch Wars

Those who had refused to fight in the war referred to the traitors as suki (“bitch”), and these outcasts landed at the bottom of the criminal hierarchy.

The suki separated from the others and formed their own groups and power bases by collaborating with prison officials, eventually gaining the luxury of comfortable positions.

Bitterness between the groups erupted in a series of Bitch Wars from 1945 to 1953, with many killed every day. Prison officials encouraged the violence, seeing it as a way to rid the prisons of criminals.

Post-Stalin Era

After the death of Stalin, around eight million inmates were released from the gulags.

Those that survived the imprisonment and Bitch Wars became a new breed of criminal, no longer bound to the laws of the old Thieves’ World. They adopted an “every-man-for-himself” attitude that meant cooperating with the government if necessary.

As corruption spread throughout the Soviet government, the criminal underworld began to flourish.

This corruption was most common during the Brezhnev era, and the nomenklatura (the power elite of the country; usually corrupt officials) ran the country – allegedly with criminal bosses.

In the 1970s, small illegal businesses sprang up throughout the country (with the government ignoring them), and the black market thrived.

In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev loosened up restrictions on private businesses, allowing them to grow legally. But by then, the Soviet Union was already beginning to collapse.

The Land of Opportunity

During the 1970s and 1980s, America relaxed its immigration policies, allowing Soviet Jews and criminals to enter the country, with most settling in a southern Brooklyn area known as Brighton Beach (sometimes nicknamed “Little Odessa”).

The neighborhood became an incubator for Russian organized crime in America.

The earliest known case of Russian crime in the area was in the mid-1970s, when the “Potato Bag Gang” – a group of con artists disguised as merchants – told customers that they were selling antique gold rubles on the cheap. In fact, they gave them bags of potatoes, bought in thousands.

By 1983, the head of Russian organized crime in Brighton Beach was Evsei Agron.

He was a prime target for other mobsters, including rival Boris Goldberg and his organization, and in May 1985, Agron was assassinated.

Boris “Biba” Nayfeld, his bodyguard, moved on to work under Marat Balagula, who was believed to have inherited Agron’s authority.

The following year, Balagula fled the country after he was convicted in a fraud scheme of Merrill Lynch customers, and was found in Frankfurt, West Germany in 1989. From there, he was extradited back to the US and sentenced to eight years in prison.

Balagula would later be convicted on a separate $360,000 credit card fraud in 1992.

Nayfeld took Balagula’s place, partnering with the “Polish Al Capone”, Ricardo Fanchiniin, in an import-export business, and setting up a heroin trade.

In 1990, Nayfeld’s former friend, Monya Elson (back from a six-year prison sentence in Israel) returned to America and set up a rival heroin business, culminating in a Mafia turf war.

The Ivankov Era

When the USSR collapsed and a free market economy emerged, gangster summit meetings had taken place in hotels and restaurants shortly before the Soviet’s dissolution, so that top vory v zakone could agree on who would rule what, and set plans on how to take over the post-Communist state.

It was agreed that Vyacheslav “Yaponchik” Ivankov would be sent to Brighton Beach in 1992 to take control of Russian organized crime in North America – allegedly because he was killing too many people in Russia.

Within a year, he built an international operation that included, but was not limited to, narcotics, money laundering, and prostitution, and had made ties with the American Mafia and Colombian drug cartels, eventually extending to Miami, Los Angeles, and Boston.

Those who went against him were usually killed.

In one instance, Ivankov attempted to buy out Georgian boss Valeri “Globus” Glugech’s drug importation business. When the latter refused the offer, he and his top associates were shot dead.

Ivankov’s arrival virtually ended the feud between Elson and Nayfeld.

Nayfeld and Elson were eventually arrested in January 1994, and in Italy in 1995, respectively.

Ivankov’s own reign ended in June 1995, when a $3.5 million attempt to extort two Russian businessmen (Alexander Volkov and Vladimir Voloshin) ended in an FBI arrest that resulted in a ten-year maximum security prison sentence.

Hands Across the Water

The worldwide extent of Russian organized crime wasn’t realized until Ludwig “Tarzan” Fainberg was arrested in January 1997, primarily due to global arms dealing.

In 1990, Fainberg had moved from Brighton Beach to Miami and opened up a strip club called Porky’s, which soon became a popular hangout for underworld criminals.

Fainberg himself gained a reputation as an ambassador to international crime groups, becoming especially close to Juan Almeida, a Colombian cocaine dealer.

Planning to expand his cocaine business, Fainberg acted as an intermediary between Almeida and the corrupt Russian military. He helped him get six Russian military helicopters in 1993, and the following year, helped arrange to buy a submarine for cocaine smuggling.

However, federal agents had been keeping a close eye on Fainberg for months.

Alexander Yasevich – an associate of the Russian military contact and an undercover DEA agent – was sent to verify the illegal deal, and in 1997, Fainberg was arrested in Miami.

Facing the possibility of life imprisonment, Fainberg agreed to testify against Almeida in exchange for a shorter sentence – which ended up being 33 months.

2001 – Present

As the 21st century dawned, new Russian Mafia bosses sprung up, while imprisoned ones were released.

Among those released were Pachovich Sloat, Marat Balagula and Vyacheslav Ivankov (the latter two in 2004).

Ivankov was extradited to Russia, but jailed once more for his alleged murders of two Turks in a Moscow restaurant in 1992; he was cleared of all charges and released in 2005. Four years later, he was assassinated by a shot in the stomach from a sniper.

Meanwhile, Monya Elson, along with Leonid Roytman, was arrested in March 2006 for an unsuccessful murder plot against two Kiev-based businessmen.

In 2009, FBI agents in Moscow targeted two suspected Mafia leaders and two other corrupt businessmen. One of the leaders was Yevgeny Dvoskin, a criminal who had been in prison with Ivankov in 1995, and was deported in 2001 for breaking immigration regulations.

The other was Konstantin “Gizya” Ginzburg, who is reportedly the current “big boss” of Russian organized crime in America (it was suspected that Ivankov handed over his control to him).

In the same year, Semion Mogilevich was placed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for his involvement in a complex multi-million dollar scheme that defrauded investors in the stock of his company YBM Magnex International, swindling them out of $150 million.

He was indicted in 2003 and arrested in 2008 in Russia on tax fraud charges, but because the US does not have an extradition treaty with Russia, he was released on bail.

Russian organized crime was reported to have a stronger grip in the French Riviera region and Spain in 2010, and Russia was branded as a virtual “Mafia state” according to the WikiLeaks cables. The Jewish branch of the Russian Mafia has created tremendous problems for the Israeli government.

As of 2009, Russian Mafia groups have been said to reach over 50 countries and, as of 2010, have up to 300,000 members.

Business is booming.

That’s it, for this one.

I hope you’ll join me, for our next tale.

Till then.

Peace.

Gangsters: Santo Trafficante, Jr.

Santo Trafficante, Jr. (November 15, 1914 – March 17, 1987) was one of the last of the old-time Mafia bosses in the United States.

He allegedly controlled organized criminal operations in Florida and Cuba, which had previously been consolidated from several rival gangs by his father, Santo Trafficante, Sr.

Reputedly the most powerful Mafioso in Batista-era Cuba, he never served time in a United States prison.

The 1997 film “Donnie Brasco” is based on the true story of an FBI undercover agent (Joseph D. “Donnie Brasco” Pistone; played by Johnny Depp) who infiltrates the mob and finds himself identifying with the Mafia life at the expense of his regular one. In the movie, Santo Trafficante is played by Val Avery.

Video comes courtesy of YouTube:

And here’s some documentary footage of the man, himself:

That’s a slice of his reel life.

Here’s what history has to tell us, about his real one:

Trafficante’s Early Life

Trafficante was born in Tampa, Florida to Sicilian parents Santo Trafficante, Sr. and his wife Maria Giuseppa Cacciatore, in 1914.

Power Bases

He maintained several houses in Tampa and Miami, and also frequented Havana, Cuba (while Fulgencio Batista was in power), and New York City.

Trafficante maintained links to the Bonanno family, in New York City, but was more closely allied with Sam Giancana, in Chicago.

While generally recognized as the most powerful organized crime figure in Florida throughout much of the 20th century, Trafficante was not believed to have total control over Miami, Miami Beach, Ft. Lauderdale, or Palm Beach.

The east coast of Florida was a loosely knit conglomerate of New York family interests with obvious links to Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Angelo Bruno, Carlos Marcello, Leo Stein and Frank Ragano.

Even today, control of Florida organized crime likely continues to be divided between New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, and international interests.

Business Ventures

U.S. Treasury Department documents indicate that law enforcement believed Trafficante’s legitimate business interests to include several legal casinos in Cuba, a Havana drive-in movie theater, and shares in the Columbia Restaurant and several other restaurants and bars in Tampa. He was rumored to be part of a Mafia syndicate which owned many other Cuban hotels and casinos.

As one of the most powerful mobsters in the U.S., Trafficante was invited to the Havana Conference in December, 1946.

Trafficante was arrested frequently throughout the 1950s on various charges of bribery and of running illegal bolita lotteries in Tampa’s Ybor City district. He escaped conviction all but once, receiving a five-year sentence, in 1954, for bribery – but his conviction was overturned by the Florida Supreme Court before he entered prison.

Cuba

During the rule of Cuban dictator General Fulgencio Batista, Trafficante openly operated the Sans Souci and the Casino International gambling establishments in Havana.

As a leading member of the syndicate, it was suspected that he also had behind-the-scenes interests in other syndicate-owned Cuban gambling casinos, namely, the Hotel Habana Riviera, the Tropicana Club, the Sevilla-Biltmore, the Capri Hotel Casino, the Commodoro, the Deauville, and the Havana Hilton.

Nightly, Batista’s “bagman” would collect 10 percent of the profits at Trafficante’s casinos.

Apalachin Fall-out

Trafficante was arrested in 1957, along with 56 other mobsters, at an apparent underworld convention – the Apalachin Meeting in New York. Charges were later dropped, though authorities believe the meeting was set up, among other things, to fill the power vacuum created by the recent assassination of Murder, Inc. head Albert Anastasia.

In January 1958, Trafficante was questioned by the Cuban National police regarding the Apalachin meeting.

A full report was made by the Cuban police (dated January 23, 1958) that includes transcripts of long distance telephone calls made from the Sans Souci during the period August–December 1957. This report was given to the District Attorney’s office.

In addition, “on January 23, 1958 the Cuban Department of Investigation, Havana, Cuba notified the Bureau of Narcotics that Santo Trafficante was registered in their Alien Office under No. 93461.”

Plots Against Castro

After Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government seized the assets of Trafficante’s Cuban businesses and expelled him from the country as an “undesirable alien,” Trafficante came into contact with various U.S. intelligence operatives, and was involved in several unsuccessful plans to assassinate Castro.

Allusions to these historic connections were confirmed by the Central Intelligence Agency’s 2007 declassification of the “Family Jewels” documents.

Kennedy Conspiracy?

Suspicions that Trafficante, along with Carlos Marcello (mob boss of New Orleans in the 1950s and 1960s), Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa, and Chicago boss Sam Giancana, were involved in some way with the John F. Kennedy assassination have been alleged repeatedly, but have not been proven.

Donnie Brasco

Trafficante was summoned to court in 1986 and questioned about his involvement with the King’s Court nightclub operated by members of the Bonanno family from New York – including undercover FBI agent Joseph D. “Joe” Pistone, alias, “Donnie Brasco”.

Trafficante again escaped conviction.

Trafficante’s Later Years

Trafficante’s health declined in his later years.

He died on March 17, 1987 at the age of 72.

And that’s it, for this one.

I hope you’ll join me, for our next story.

Till then.

Peace.

Gangsters: Al Capone

Alphonse Gabriel “Al” Capone (January 17, 1899 – January 25, 1947) was an American gangster who led a Prohibition-era crime syndicate known as The Chicago Outfit, which later became known as the “Capones.”

From the early 1920s to 1931, The Outfit was dedicated to smuggling and bootlegging liquor, and other illegal activities in Chicago, such as prostitution.

Despite his criminal enterprises, Capone became a highly visible public figure. He made donations to various charitable endeavors using the money he made from his activities, and was viewed by many as a “modern-day Robin Hood”.

Robert De Niro gave an Oscar-nominated performance as Al Capone in “The Untouchables” (1987).

Video comes courtesy of YouTube:

That was Hollywood.

This is history:

Capone’s Early Life

Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born in the borough of Brooklyn in New York, on January 17, 1899.

His parents, Gabriele and Teresina Capone were immigrants from Italy. His father was a barber from Castellammare di Stabia, a town about 16 mi (26 km) south of Naples, and his mother was a seamstress and the daughter of Angelo Raiola from Angri, a town in the Province of Salerno.

Gabriele and Teresa had nine children: Alphonse “Scarface Al” Capone, James Capone (also known as Richard Two-Gun Hart – a lawman!), Raffaele Capone (a.k.a. Ralph “Bottles” Capone, who took charge of his brother’s beverage industry), Salvatore “Frank” Capone, John Capone, Albert Capone, Matthew Capone, Rose Capone, and Mafalda Capone (who married John J. Maritote).

The Capone family emigrated to the United States, and settled at 95 Navy Street, in the Navy Yard section of downtown Brooklyn. Gabriele Capone worked at a nearby barber shop at 29 Park Avenue.

When Al was 11, the Capone family moved to 38 Garfield Place in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Capone showed promise as a student, but had trouble with the rules at his strict Catholic school. He dropped out, at the age of 14, after being expelled for hitting a female teacher in the face.

He worked at odd jobs around Brooklyn, including a candy store and a bowling alley. During this time, Capone was influenced by gangster Johnny Torrio, whom he came to regard as a mentor.

Gangland Style: Scarface

After his initial stint with small-time gangs that included the Junior Forty Thieves and the Bowery Boys, Capone joined the Brooklyn Rippers, and then the powerful Five Points Gang based in Lower Manhattan.

During this time, he was employed and mentored by fellow racketeer Frankie Yale, a bartender in a Coney Island dance hall and saloon called the Harvard Inn.

After he inadvertently insulted a woman while working the door at a Brooklyn night club, Capone was attacked by her brother, Frank Gallucio, and his face was slashed three times on the left side. These scars gave him the nickname “Scarface.”

Yale insisted that Capone apologize to Gallucio, and Capone later hired him as a bodyguard.

When photographed, Capone hid the scarred left side of his face, saying the injuries were war wounds.

Capone was called “Snorky” by his closest friends.

Marriage

On December 30, 1918, Capone married Mae Josephine Coughlin, who was Irish Catholic and who, earlier that month, had given birth to their first son, Albert Francis (“Sonny”) Capone. As Capone was under the age of 21, his parents had to consent to the marriage in writing.

Chicago

Capone departed New York for Chicago without his new wife and son, who joined him later.

In 1923, he purchased a small house at 7244 South Prairie Avenue in the Park Manor neighborhood on the city’s south side, for $5,500.

Capone was recruited for Chicago by Johnny Torrio, his Five Points Gang mentor. He saw many business opportunities there, especially bootlegging, following the onset of Prohibition. Chicago’s location on Lake Michigan gave access to a vast inland territory, and it was well-served by railroads.

Torrio took over the crime empire of James “Big Jim” Colosimo, after he was murdered. Capone was suspected in the murders of Colosimo and two other men.

City Politics

The 1924 town council elections in Cicero became known as one of the most crooked election campaigns in the Chicago area’s long history of rigged elections, with voters threatened by thugs at polling stations.

Capone’s mayoral candidate won by a huge margin – but weeks later announced that he would run Capone out of town. Capone met with his puppet-mayor, and knocked him down the town hall steps.

For Capone, the election victory was also marred by the death of his younger brother Frank at the hands of the police. Capone cried at his brother’s funeral and ordered the closure of all the speakeasies in Cicero for a day, as a mark of respect.

Cicero Power Base

The Torrio-Capone organization, as well as the Sicilian-American Genna crime family, competed with the North Side Gang of Dean O’Banion.

In May 1924, O’Banion discovered that their Sieben Brewery was about to be raided by federal agents, and sold his share to Torrio. After the raid, both O’Banion and Torrio were arrested.

Torrio’s people murdered O’Banion in revenge on October 10, 1924, provoking a gang war.

In 1925, Torrio was severely injured in an attack by the North Side Gang. He turned over his business to Capone and returned to Italy.

During the Prohibition Era, Capone controlled large portions of the Chicago underworld, which provided The Outfit with an estimated US $100 million a year in revenue. This wealth was generated through numerous illegal enterprises, such as gambling and prostitution; the highest revenue was generated by the sale of liquor.

Bootleg Operations

Capone’s transportation network moved smuggled liquor from the rum-runners of the East Coast – The Purple Gang in Detroit – who brought liquor in from Canada, with help from Belle River native Blaise Diesbourg, also known as “King Canada”.

Local production came from Midwestern moonshine operations and illegal breweries.

With the revenues gained from his bootlegging operation, Capone increased his grip on the political and law-enforcement establishments in Chicago.

He made his headquarters at Chicago’s Lexington Hotel, later nicknamed “Capone’s Castle”.

Capone’s gang operated largely free from legal intrusion, thanks to measures like the bribing of Chicago Mayor William “Big Bill” Hale Thompson.

A High Profile

Capone operated casinos and speakeasies throughout the city.

With his wealth, he indulged in custom suits, cigars, gourmet food and drink (his preferred liquor was Templeton Rye from Iowa), jewelry, and female companionship.

He garnered media attention, to which his favorite responses were “I am just a businessman, giving the people what they want,” and “All I do is satisfy a public demand.”

Capone had become a celebrity.

Backlash

His rivals – most notably North Side gangsters Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran – retaliated for the violence of Capone’s enforcement methods.

More than once, Capone’s car was riddled with bullets.

On September 20, 1926, the North Side gang shot into Capone’s entourage as he was eating lunch in the Hawthorne Hotel restaurant. A motorcade of ten vehicles, using Thompson submachine guns and shotguns, riddled the outside of the Hotel and the restaurant on the first floor of the building.

Capone’s bodyguard, Frankie Rio, threw him to the ground at the first sound of gunfire.

Several bystanders were hurt by flying glass and bullet fragments in the raid. Capone paid for the medical care of a young boy and his mother who would have lost her eyesight otherwise.

This event prompted Capone to call for a truce – but negotiations fell through.

Capone placed armed bodyguards around the clock at his headquarters at the Lexington Hotel.

Retreats and Hideouts

For his trips away from Chicago, Capone was reputed to have had several other retreats and hideouts in places including Couderay, Wisconsin.

Capone’s Couderay hideout (a popular tourist attraction in later years) is a 407-acre property, complete with a 37-acre lake which reputedly was used to land planes filled with illegal liquor for shipment south to Chicago.

As a further precaution, Capone and his entourage would often show up suddenly at one of Chicago’s train depots, and buy up an entire Pullman sleeper car on night trains to places like Cleveland, Omaha, Kansas City, Little Rock or Hot Springs – where they would spend a week in luxury hotel suites under assumed names.

In 1928, Capone bought a 14-room retreat on Palm Island, Florida, close to Miami Beach.

The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre

Details of the killing of seven victims on Saint Valentine’s Day, 1929, in a garage at 2122 North Clark Street (then the SMC Cartage Co.) in the Lincoln Park neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side – and the extent of Capone’s involvement in it – are widely disputed.

No one was ever brought to trial for the crime.

The massacre was thought to be the Outfit’s effort to strike back at Bugs Moran’s North Side gang. They had been increasingly bold in hijacking the Outfit’s booze trucks, assassinating two presidents of the Outfit-controlled Unione Siciliana, and making three assassination attempts on Jack McGurn, one of Capone’s top enforcers.

To monitor their targets’ habits and movements, Capone’s men rented an apartment across from the trucking warehouse that served as a Moran headquarters.

On the morning of Thursday February 14, 1929, Capone’s lookouts allegedly signaled gunmen disguised as police to start a ‘raid’.

The fake policemen lined the seven victims along a wall, then signaled for accomplices with machine guns and shotguns.

Photos of the massacre victims shocked the public, and damaged Capone’s reputation.

Federal law enforcement now took a closer look at his activities.

Federal Investigation of Al Capone

In 1929, Bureau of Prohibition agent Eliot Ness began an investigation of Capone and his business, attempting to get a conviction for Prohibition violations.

Frank J. Wilson investigated Capone’s income tax violations – which the government decided was more likely material for a conviction.

In 1931 Capone was indicted for income tax evasion and various violations of the Volstead Act (Prohibition) at the Chicago Federal Building in the courtroom of Judge James Herbert Wilkerson.

His attorneys made a plea bargain, but the presiding judge warned that he might not follow the sentencing recommendation from the prosecution. Capone withdrew his plea of guilty.

Conviction and Imprisonment

Capone’s attempt to bribe and intimidate the potential jurors was discovered by Ness’s men, who were dubbed “The Untouchables”.

The jury pool was switched with one from another case, and Capone was stymied.

Following a long trial, on October 17 the jury returned a mixed verdict, finding Capone guilty of five counts of tax evasion and failing to file tax returns. The Volstead Act violations were dropped.

The judge sentenced him to 11 years imprisonment (at the time, the longest tax evasion sentence ever given), along with heavy fines, and liens (The right to take another’s property if an obligation is not discharged) were filed against his various properties.

Capone’s appeals of both the conviction and the sentence were denied.

One of the Capone properties seized by the federal government was an armored limousine. The car was later used to protect President Franklin D. Roosevelt after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

In May 1932, Capone was sent to Atlanta U.S. Penitentiary, where he was able to obtain special privileges. Later, for a short period of time, he was transferred to the Lincoln Heights Jail.

He was transferred to Alcatraz on August 11, 1934, which had been newly established as a prison on an island off San Francisco.

Al Capone at Alcatraz

On the island, the warden kept tight security and cut off Capone’s contact with colleagues.

During his early months at Alcatraz, Capone made an enemy by showing his disregard for the prison social order, when he cut in line while prisoners were waiting for a haircut.

James Lucas, a Texas bank robber serving 30 years, reportedly confronted the former syndicate leader and told him to get back to the end of the line. When Capone asked if he knew who he was, Lucas reportedly grabbed a pair of the barber’s scissors and, holding them to Capone’s neck, answered “Yeah, I know who you are, greaseball. And if you don’t get back to the end of that f – ing line, I’m gonna know who you were.”

Capone was admitted to the prison hospital with a minor wound, and released a few days later.

Gradually, his health declined, as the syphilis which he had contracted as a youth progressed. He spent the last year of his sentence in the prison hospital, confused and disoriented.

Capone completed his term in Alcatraz on January 6, 1939, and was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution at Terminal Island in California, to serve the one-year contempt of court term he was originally sentenced to serve in Chicago’s Cook County jail.

He was paroled on November 16, 1939, and, after spending a short time in a hospital, returned to his home in Palm Island, Florida.

His Final Years

Capone’s control and interests within organized crime diminished rapidly, after his imprisonment. Additionally, 20 years of high living had seriously ravaged his health. He had lost weight, and his physical and mental health had deteriorated under the effects of neurosyphilis.

In 1946, his physician and a Baltimore psychiatrist performed examinations and concluded that Capone then had the mental capacity of a 12-year-old child. He often raved about Communists, foreigners, and Bugs Moran – who he was convinced was plotting to kill him from his Ohio prison cell.

Unable to resume his criminal career, Capone spent the last years of his life at his mansion in Florida.

On January 21, 1947, Capone had a stroke. He regained consciousness and started to improve, but contracted pneumonia.

He suffered a near-fatal cardiac arrest the next day.

On January 25, 1947 Al Capone died in his home, surrounded by his family, and was buried at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois.

And our story ends, here.

Hope I’ll see you, for the next one.

Till then.

Peace.

Gangsters: Meyer Lansky

Meyer Lansky (born Meyer Suchowljansky; July 4, 1902 – January 15, 1983), known as the “Mob’s Accountant,” was a Russian-born American organized crime figure who, along with his associate Charles “Lucky” Luciano, was instrumental in the development of the “National Crime Syndicate” in the United States.

For decades he was thought to be one of the most powerful people in the country.

Lansky developed a gambling empire which stretched from Saratoga, New York to Miami, to Council Bluffs, Iowa and Las Vegas; it is also said that he oversaw gambling concessions in Cuba.

Although a member of the Jewish Mob, Lansky undoubtedly had strong influence with the Italian Mafia, and played a large part in the consolidation of the criminal underworld.

The film “Bugsy” (1991) included Lansky as a major character, played by Ben Kingsley – who was Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actor for the role.

Video is courtesy of YouTube:

That was the Hollywood vision.

Let’s see what history has to tell us.

Lansky’s Early Life

Lansky was born Meyer Suchowljansky in Grodno (then in Russia, now in Belarus).

Lansky was the brother of Jacob “Jake” Lansky, who in 1959 was the manager of the Nacional Hotel in Havana, Cuba.

In 1911, he emigrated to the United States through the port of Odessa with his mother and brother to join his father, who had left for the United States in 1909, and settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York.

Lansky met Bugsy Siegel when they were teenagers.

As a youngster, Siegel saved Lansky’s life several times, a fact which Lansky always appreciated. The two skillfully managed the Bugs and Meyer Mob, despite its reputation as one of the most violent Prohibition gangs.

They became lifelong friends, as well as associates in the bootlegging trade, and together with Lucky Luciano, formed a lasting partnership.

Lansky was instrumental in Luciano’s rise to power by organizing the 1931 murder of Mafia powerhouse Salvatore Maranzano.

Gambling Operations

By 1936, Lansky had established gambling operations in Florida, New Orleans, and Cuba.

These ventures were successful, as they were founded on two innovations:

First, Lansky and his associates had the technical expertise to effectively manage them, based on Lansky’s knowledge of the true mathematical odds of most popular wagering games.

Second, mob connections were used to ensure legal and physical security of their establishments from other crime figures, and law enforcement (through bribes).

There was also an absolute rule of integrity concerning the games and wagers made within their establishments.

Lansky’s “carpet joints” in Florida and elsewhere were never “clip-joints” – where gamblers were unsure of whether or not the games were rigged against them.

Lansky ensured that the staff (the croupiers and their management) actually consisted of men of high integrity.

Contingency Measures

In 1936, Lansky’s partner Luciano was sent to prison.

After Al Capone’s 1931 conviction for tax evasion and prostitution, Lansky saw that he too was vulnerable to a similar charge.

To protect himself, he transferred the illegal earnings from his growing casino empire to a Swiss numbered bank account, whose anonymity was assured by the 1934 Swiss Banking Act.

Ultimately, Lansky even bought an offshore bank in Switzerland, which he used to launder money through a network of shell and holding companies.

The War Effort

In the 1930s, Meyer Lansky and his gang claimed to have stepped outside their usual criminal activities to break up rallies held by Nazi sympathizers. Lansky recalled a particular rally in Yorkville (a German neighborhood in Manhattan), that he claimed he and 14 other associates disrupted:

“The stage was decorated with a swastika and a picture of Adolf Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only fifteen of us, but we went into action. We threw some of them out the windows. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults.”

During World War II, Lansky was also instrumental in helping the Office of Naval Intelligence’s Operation Underworld, in which the government recruited criminals to watch out for German infiltrators and submarine-borne saboteurs.

According to “Lucky” Luciano’s authorized biography, during this time, Lansky helped arrange a deal with the U.S. Government via a high-ranking U.S. Navy official. This deal would secure the release of Luciano from prison; in exchange, the Italian Mafia would provide security for the war ships that were being built along the docks in New York Harbor.

The Flamingo

During the 1940s, Lansky’s associate Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel persuaded the crime bosses to invest in a lavish new casino hotel project in Las Vegas: the Flamingo.

After long delays and large cost overruns, the Flamingo Hotel was still not open for business.

To discuss the Flamingo problem, the Mafia investors attended a secret meeting in Havana, Cuba in 1946.

While the other bosses wanted to kill Siegel, Lansky begged them to give his friend a second chance.

Despite this reprieve, Siegel continued to lose Mafia money on the Flamingo Hotel.

A second family meeting was then called. By the time this meeting took place, the casino had turned a small profit. Lansky again, with Luciano’s support, convinced the family to give Siegel more time.

But the Flamingo was soon losing money again.

At a third meeting, the family decided that Siegel was finished.

It is widely believed that Lansky himself was compelled to give the final okay on eliminating Siegel, due to his long relationship with him, and his stature in the family.

The Killing of Bugsy Siegel

On June 20, 1947, Siegel was shot and killed in Beverly Hills, California.

Twenty minutes after the Siegel hit, Lansky’s associates, including Gus Greenbaum and Moe Sedway, walked into the Flamingo Hotel and took control of the property.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Lansky retained a substantial financial interest in the Flamingo for the next twenty years. Lansky said in several interviews later in his life that if it had been up to him, “… Ben Siegel would be alive today.”

This also marked a power transfer in Vegas from the New York crime families to the Chicago Outfit. Lansky is believed to have both advised and aided Chicago boss Tony Accardo in initially establishing his hold.

Cuba

After World War II, Lansky associate Lucky Luciano was paroled from prison on the condition that he permanently return to Sicily. However, Luciano secretly moved to Cuba, where he worked to resume control over American Mafia operations.

Luciano ran a number of casinos in Cuba with the sanction of Cuban president General Fulgencio Batista – though the US government ultimately succeeded in pressuring the Batista regime to deport Luciano.

Batista’s closest friend in the Mafia was Lansky. They formed a renowned friendship and business relationship that lasted for a decade.

During a stay at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in the late 1940s, it was mutually agreed that, in exchange for kickbacks, Batista would offer Lansky and the Mafia control of Havana’s racetracks and casinos. Batista would open Havana to large scale gambling, and his government would match, dollar for dollar, any hotel investment over $1 million – which would include a casino license.

Lansky would place himself at the center of Cuba’s gambling operations. He immediately called on his associates to hold a summit in Havana.

The Havana Conference

The Havana Conference was held on December 22, 1946 at the Hotel Nacional. This was the first full-scale meeting of American underworld leaders since the Chicago meeting in 1932.

Present were such figures as Joe Adonis and Albert “The Mad Hatter” Anastasia, Frank Costello, Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno, Vito Genovese, Moe Dalitz, Thomas Luchese from New York, Santo Trafficante Jr. from Tampa, Carlos Marcello from New Orleans, and Stefano Magaddino, Joe Bonanno’s cousin from Buffalo.

From Chicago there were Anthony Accardo and the Fischetti brothers (“Trigger-Happy” Charlie and Rocco), and, representing the Jewish interest, Lansky, Dalitz and “Dandy” Phil Kastel from Florida.

The first to arrive was Lucky Luciano, who had been deported to Italy, and had to travel to Havana with a false passport.

Lansky shared with the “delegates” his vision of a new Havana, profitable for those willing to invest the right sum of money.

According to Luciano’s evidence (he is the only one who ever recounted details of the events), he confirmed that he was appointed as kingpin for the mob, to rule from Cuba until such time as he could find a legitimate way back into the U.S.

Entertainment at the conference was provided by, among others, Frank Sinatra.

Political Moves

In 1952, Lansky allegedly offered then President Carlos Prío Socarrás a bribe of U.S. $250,000 to step down, so Batista could return to power.

Once Batista retook control of the government he quickly put gambling back on track. The dictator contacted Lansky and offered him an annual salary of U.S. $25,000 to serve as an unofficial gambling minister.

By 1955, Batista had changed the gambling laws once again, granting a gaming license to anyone who invested $1 million in a hotel or U.S. $200,000 in a new nightclub.

Unlike the procedure for acquiring gaming licenses in Vegas, this provision exempted venture capitalists from background checks. As long as they made the required investment, they were provided with public matching funds for construction, a 10-year tax exemption, and duty-free importation of equipment and furnishings.

The government would get U.S. $250,000 for the license, plus a percentage of the profits from each casino.

Cuba’s 10,000 slot machines were to be the province of Batista’s brother-in-law, Roberto Fernandez y Miranda. Fernandez was also given the parking meters in Havana, as an extra.

Import duties were waived on materials for hotel construction, and connected Cuban contractors made windfalls by importing much more than was needed, and selling the surplus to others for hefty profits.

It was rumored that periodic payoffs were requested (and received) by corrupt politicians.

Hospitality

Lansky set about reforming the Montmartre Club, which soon became the “in” place in Havana. He had also long expressed an interest in putting a casino in the elegant Hotel Nacional, which overlooked El Morro, the ancient fortress guarding Havana harbor.

Lansky planned to take a wing of the 10-story hotel and create luxury suites for high-stakes players.

Batista endorsed Lansky’s idea over the objections of American expatriates such as Ernest Hemingway, and the elegant hotel opened for business in 1955 with a show by Eartha Kitt. The casino was an immediate success.

Once all the new hotels, nightclubs and casinos had been built, Batista wasted no time collecting his share of the profits.

Nightly, the “bagman” for his wife collected 10 percent of the profits at Trafficante’s interests: the Sans Souci cabaret, and the casinos in the hotels Sevilla-Biltmore, Commodoro, Deauville and Capri (part-owned by the actor George Raft).

His take from the Lansky casinos – his prized Habana Riviera, the Nacional, the Montmartre Club and others – was said to be 30 percent. The slot machines alone contributed approximately U.S. $1 million to the regime’s bank account.

What Batista and his cronies actually received in total by way of bribes, payoffs, and profiteering has never been established.

The Castro Revolution

The 1959 Cuban revolution and the rise of Fidel Castro changed the climate for mob investment in Cuba.

On New Year’s Eve of 1958, while Batista was preparing to flee to the Dominican Republic and then on to Spain (where he died in exile in 1973), many of the casinos (including several of Lansky’s) were looted and destroyed.

On January 8, 1959, Castro marched into Havana and took over, setting up shop in the Hilton.

Lansky had fled the day before for the Bahamas and other Caribbean destinations.

The new Cuban president, Manuel Urrutia Lleó, took steps to close the casinos.

In October 1960, Castro nationalized the island’s hotel-casinos and outlawed gambling.

This action essentially wiped out Lansky’s asset base and revenue streams. He lost an estimated $7 million.

With the additional crackdown on casinos in Miami, Lansky was forced to depend on his Las Vegas revenues.

Lansky’s Later Years

In his later years, Lansky lived a low-profile, routine existence in Miami Beach.

He dressed like the average grandfather, walked his dog every morning, and portrayed himself as a harmless retiree.

Lansky’s associates usually met him in malls and other crowded locations.

Lansky would change drivers (who chauffeured him around town to look for new pay phones to contact his associates), almost every day.

Attempted Escape to Israel

In 1970, Lansky fled to Herzliya Pituah, Israel, to escape federal tax evasion charges.

Although the Israeli Law of Return allows any Jew to settle in the State of Israel, it excludes those with criminal pasts.

Two years after Lansky fled, Israeli authorities deported him back to the U.S.

The U.S. government brought Lansky to trial with the testimony of loan shark Vincent “Fat Vinnie” Teresa, an informant with little or no credibility.

Lansky was acquitted in 1974.

The Death of Meyer Lansky

Lansky’s last years were spent quietly at his home in Miami Beach.

He died of lung cancer on January 15, 1983, age 80, leaving behind a widow and three children.

On paper, Lansky was worth almost nothing. At the time, the FBI believed he left behind over $300 million in hidden bank accounts – but they never found any money.

His biographer Robert Lacey concluded from evidence (including interviews with the surviving members of the family) that Lansky’s wealth and influence had been grossly exaggerated, and that it would be more accurate to think of him as an accountant for gangsters, rather than a gangster himself.

According to Hank Messick, a journalist for the Miami Herald who had spent years investigating Lansky, “Meyer Lansky doesn’t own property. He owns people”.

Messick, the FBI and District Attorney Robert Morgenthau all believed that Lansky had kept large sums of money in other people’s names for decades, and that keeping very little in his own was nothing new to him.

$300 million.

He didn’t take it with him.

Anyhow, that’s it, for this one.

Hope you’ll join me, for the next.

Till then.

Peace.

Gangsters: Murder, Inc.

Murder, Inc. (or Murder Incorporated or the Brownsville Boys; known in syndicate circles as The Combination) was the name the press gave to organized crime groups operating in the 1930s and 1940s, that acted as the “enforcement arm” of the Jewish Mafia and later the American Mafia, the early organized crime groups in New York, and elsewhere.

Murder, Inc. was responsible for between 400 and 1,000 contract killings, until the group was exposed in the early 1940s by informer and group member Abe “Kid Twist” Reles.

In the trials that followed, many members were convicted and executed.

Abe Reles himself died, after mysteriously falling out of a window.

Several members of the group featured in the 1991 film, “Mobsters”.

Video comes courtesy of YouTube:

That was the Hollywood version, MTV-style.

Here are the historical facts:

Known Members

Charles “Lucky” Luciano – Founder of the National Crime Syndicate, which used Murder, Inc. as its enforcers
Meyer Lansky – Luciano’s right-hand man in the National Crime Syndicate, who helped form Murder, Inc.
Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel – one of the founder members
Vincent Mangano – boss of his own family and Murder, Inc. until the Commission took it over
Louis “Lepke” Buchalter – original head of Murder, Inc.
Albert *The Mad Hatter” Anastasia – Succeeded Buchalter until he became boss of the Gambino crime family
Abe “Kid Twist” Reles – Potential witness, who was murdered before he could give evidence against other members of Murder, Inc.
Martin “Buggsy” Goldstein
Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss
Louis Capone – a member of Murder, Inc. who worked under Albert Anastasia and Louis Buchalter.
Allie “Tick Tock” Tannenbaum
Seymour Magoon – the only Irish member of the group
Harry Maione – Leader of the Italian faction of Murder, Inc.
Mendy Weiss
Hyman “Curly” Holtz
Jacob “Jack” Shapiro
Frank “The Dasher” Abbandando – belonged to the Italian faction
Charles “Charlie the Bug” Workman
Joe Adonis – belonged to the Italian faction
Louis Cohen
Frankie Carbo
Louis “Shadow” Kravitz
Philip “Little Farvel” Kovolick
Samuel “Red” Levine

Origins and Early Activities

Murder, Inc. was established after the formation of the commission of the National Crime Syndicate, to which it ultimately answered.

Largely headed by former mob enforcers Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Meyer Lansky, it also had members from Louis Buchalter’s labor-racketeering gang (in partnership with Tommy “Three-Fingered Brown” Lucchese), as well as from another group of enforcers from Brownsville, New York, of the late 1920s, led by Martin “Buggsy” Goldstein and Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, operating out of an unassuming candy store known as Midnight Rose’s.

Buchalter, in particular, and Joe Adonis occasionally, gave the outfit its orders from the board of directors of the syndicate.

Albert “The Mad Hatter” Anastasia was the group’s operating head, or “Lord High Executioner”, assisted by Lepke’s longtime associate Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro.

In the 1930s Buchalter used Murder, Inc. to murder witnesses and suspected informants when he was investigated by crusading prosecutor Thomas Dewey.

Methods and Means

Most of the killers were Jewish gangsters from the gangs of the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brownsville, East New York, and Ocean Hill.

In addition to carrying out crime in New York City and acting as enforcers for New York mobster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, group members accepted murder contracts from mob bosses all around the United States.

Murder Inc. hit men used a wide variety of weapons, including ice picks, to murder their victims.

Though the group had a number of members, Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss was the most prolific killer, committing over 100 murders (some historians put the number as high as 500).

The killers were paid a regular salary as retainer, as well as an average fee of $1,000 to $5,000 per killing. Their families also received monetary benefits.

If the killers were caught, the mob would hire the best lawyers for their defense.

The Murder of Dutch Schultz

Murder Inc.’s best known victim was probably Dutch Schultz, a mobster who had openly defied the syndicate.

In October 1935, Schultz insisted on assassinating Thomas Dewey, who was leading an all-out effort to put the mob out of business.

The syndicate board overruled Schultz. They feared – with good reason – that Dewey’s murder would inflame public outrage to new heights, and result in an even greater campaign to shut down the rackets.

Schultz vowed that he would ignore the board’s decision and kill Dewey himself.

The board decided they needed to act immediately, to kill Schultz before he killed Dewey.

In an ironic twist Buchalter actually saved Dewey’s life – which allowed Dewey to continue his efforts to bring down Buchalter.

Hitmen Mendy Weiss and Charles Workman were given the assignment to kill Dutch Schultz.

On October 24, 1935, they tracked down Schultz and his associates Otto Berman, Abe Landau, and Lulu Rosenkrantz and shot them at the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey. Berman, Landau, and Rosenkrantz died almost immediately, while Schultz clung to life until the following day.

As the thorough Workman stayed behind to make sure they had completed their assignment and finished off Schultz in the men’s room of the restaurant, Weiss escaped the scene with their Murder, Inc. getaway driver Seymour Schechter.

Furious at being abandoned by his confederates, Workman had to make his way back to Brooklyn, on foot.

A day or two later Workman filed a ‘grievance’ with the board against Weiss and Schechter.

Although he had simply followed Weiss’ frantic orders to drive away without waiting for Workman, the unfortunate Schechter ended up bearing the punishment – becoming a Murder Inc victim himself, a short time later.

Informants

In January 1940, professional criminal and police informer Harry Rudolph was held as a material witness in the murder of 19-year-old minor gangster Alex Alpert. Alpert had been shot in the back on a street corner in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn on November 25, 1933.

While in custody, Rudolph talked with Brooklyn District Attorney William O’Dwyer. With Rudolph’s testimony, O’Dwyer secured first-degree murder indictments against Abe Reles, Martin Goldstein and Anthony Maffetore.

After the three were indicted, O’Dwyer learned from Special Prosecutor John Harlan Amen that Rudolph was reportedly offered a $5,000 bribe by another prisoner, on behalf of the syndicate, to “put Reles and Goldstein on the street”.

O’Dwyer stated that when Maffetore learned of the bribe offer to help clear Reles and Goldstein and after several talks with New York City Detective John Osnato, he decided to turn state’s evidence.

Maffetore eventually stated that he was not involved in the Alpert murder, but was the driver in six other gangland murders.

Maffetore then convinced Abraham Levine to talk.

Reles was next to cooperate with the District Attorney’s office.

The Downfall of Murder Inc.

The testimony of “Kid Twist” Reles was particularly important to the prosecution, as he was a more senior gang member, and he is considered the key to the downfall of Murder, Inc.

Soon after Reles agreed to cooperate, numerous first-degree murder indictments were issued in Brooklyn, The Bronx, and in upstate Sullivan County (Catskills).

Additional members of the “Combination” were added to the list of cooperating witnesses, including Albert Tannenbaum, Seymour Magoon and Sholem Bernstein.

Ironically, Harry Rudolph’s testimony was never used in any of the trials, as he died of natural causes in the infirmary at Rikers Island in June 1940.

Abe Reles fell to his death from a room at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island on November 12, 194 – even though he was under police guard. The official verdict was “accidental death by defenestration”, but the angle of his trajectory suggests that he was pushed.

Harry Maione and Frank Abbandando

Harry Maione and Frank Abbandando were the first members of the Brooklyn “Combination” to be put on trial for murder.

In May 1940, they and Harry Strauss were indicted for the May 25, 1937, ice-pick murder of George “Whitey” Rudnick in a Brooklyn parking garage.

Strauss – after agreeing to cooperate with the District Attorney’s office – was eventually excluded from the trial.

On May 15, 1940, Abe Reles testified that Rudnick was marked for death after Strauss claimed he had obtained information that Rudnick was a “stool pigeon for the police.” Reles also testified that he waited outside the garage while Maione, Abbandando and Strauss were inside with Rudnick.

After Rudnick was believed to have been murdered, Abbandando called for Reles and summoned Angelo “Julie” Catalano to the garage to assist with moving the body. Rudnick was still alive, so Strauss resumed his assault with an ice pick, and Maione used a meat cleaver to complete the job.

The next day, Catalano (who drove the automobile with Rudnick’s body) corroborated Reles’ account of the murder.

“Dukey” Maffetore and Abe “Pretty” Levine testified that they stole the automobile that was used to dispose of the body.

For the defense, Maione and 14 witnesses testified that he was at his grandmother’s wake when Rudnick was murdered.

The funeral home undertaker and embalmer, however, testified that Maione was not at the wake. Also, one of Maione’s chief witnesses admitted that he committed perjury as ordered by Maione’s brother, whom he feared.

On May 23, 1940, Maione and Abbandando were convicted of first-degree murder, which meant a mandatory sentence of death in the electric chair.

New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, overturned the conviction on a 4–3 vote in December 1940.

A second trial started on March 10, 1941.

Maione and Abbandando were convicted of first-degree murder for a second time on April 3, 1941, and were formally sentenced to death for a second time on April 14, 1941.

The Court of Appeals upheld the second conviction on January 8, 1942.

Maione and Abbandando were executed at Sing Sing prison on February 19, 1942.

Harry Strauss and Martin Goldstein

Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss and Martin “Buggsy” Goldstein were put on trial for the September 4, 1939, strangulation murder of a bookmaker whose body was set on fire and left in a vacant lot after Feinstein had been strangled.

The trial started in September 1940 with Strauss feigning insanity.

Abe Reles, the chief prosecution witness, testified that Feinstein was murdered on orders of Albert Anastasia. Reles testified that he, Goldstein and Strauss murdered Feinstein in his house.

Reles’s mother-in-law also testified that Reles and Strauss had asked her for an ice pick and some clothesline earlier in the day and, while at the house, heard loud music masking a commotion in the living room. She also testified hearing Strauss say that he had been bitten.

Goldstein’s former bodyguard/driver Seymour Magoon corroborated the story, as he testified that on the night of the murder, Goldstein told him that he along with Reles and Strauss had murdered Puggy Feinstein and that shortly after the crime was committed, Goldstein and “Duke” Maffetore burned the body.

Goldstein’s attorney decided not to put up a defense.

Strauss’s lawyer claimed his client was insane. Strauss was briefly allowed on the witness stand, but refused to take his oath and was “babbling incoherently” as he was led back to the defense table. Strauss then began chewing on a leather strap of a briefcase.

On September 19, 1940, Strauss and Goldstein were convicted of first-degree murder, and sentenced to death in the electric chair a week later.

Strauss and Goldstein were executed in the electric chair on June 12, 1941.

Charles Workman

Charles Workman was indicted in New Jersey on March 27, 1940, for the October 23, 1935, murder of Dutch Schultz and three members of his gang.

The trial, which opened in June 1941, featured testimony from Abe Reles and Albert Tannenbaum as the primary underworld witnesses against Workman.

Next, a female friend of slain gangster Danny Fields, who was described as a “collector for the payroll” of Lepke, testified that Workman showed up at her apartment the day after Schultz’s murder and asked Fields to burn his clothes. The woman (who used a pseudonym on the witness stand) testified that Workman openly talked about the Schultz killing, and how he was left behind in the restaurant.

Workman’s defense opened with testimony from Marty Krompier, a close associate of Dutch Schultz who was shot and wounded in Manhattan the same night Schultz was murdered in New Jersey. Krompier testified that Tannenbaum told him that he did not shoot him, as he was in New Jersey and had killed Schultz.

Workman, in the middle of his defense, changed his plea from ‘not guilty’ to ‘no contest’ after one of his chief witnesses, a Manhattan funeral director who testified that Workman was employed by him during the time of the Schultz murder and who was the brother-in-law of the late Lepke associate Danny Fields, recanted his testimony.

The same day that Workman changed his plea, he was sentenced to life in prison.

Workman was paroled on March 10, 1964, after serving 23 years in jail.

Louis Buchalter, Emanuel Weiss, Louis Capone, Harry Strauss, James Ferraco and Philip Cohen

Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Emanuel “Mendy” Weiss, Louis Capone, Harry Strauss, James “Dizzy” Ferraco and Philip “Little Farvel” Cohen were indicted for the murder of candy-store owner Joe Rosen, who was murdered in Brooklyn on September 13, 1936.

Cohen had his murder indictment dropped prior to the start of the trial, after his conviction on a federal narcotics charge, and received a 10-year sentence.

James Ferraco had vanished without trace, and was presumably killed in 1940 or 1941, while Harry Strauss had already been executed for the murder of Irving Feinstein.

Securing a jury for Lepke proved difficult.

After enough jurors were finally selected, the trial actually started in October 1941.

The trial featured the testimony of Rosen’s wife and son, a teacher, and underworld turncoat Sholem “Sol” Bernstein – who was marked for death after refusing to carry out a murder contract on Irving “Big Gangi” Cohen, who had fled to California after the murder of Walter Sage in 1937.

Lepke, Weiss and Capone were convicted on November 30, 1941.

The Supreme Court upheld the conviction in June 1943.

Lepke, Weiss and Capone were executed in Sing-Sing prison on March 4, 1944.

After the Trials

With many of its members executed or imprisoned, Murder, Inc. vanished within a few years.

What goes around, comes around.

I hope you’ll be around, for our next installments.

I’ll be looking at some of the Depression-era badmen (and women) who have passed into infamy, and folklore.

Till then.

Peace.

The Gunfighters: Billy the Kid

William H. Bonney (born William Henry McCarty, Jr. c. November 23, 1859 – c. July 14, 1881), better known as Billy the Kid (but also known as Henry Antrim), was a 19th-century American gunman who participated in the Lincoln County War, and became a frontier outlaw in the American Old West.

According to legend, Billy killed 21 men, but it is generally believed that he only killed between four and nine.

He killed his first man at 18.

Relatively unknown during most of his lifetime, Billy was catapulted into legend in 1881, when New Mexico’s governor, Lew Wallace, placed a price on his head.

At the movies, Billy the Kid was played by actor Emilio Estevez, in the 1988 film “Young Guns”, and its 1990 sequel, “Young Guns II”.

Video comes courtesy of YouTube:

So much, for Hollywood.

Here’s what history has to say:

Billy’s Early life

William Henry McCarty, Jr. is believed by Michael Wallis and Robert M. Utley, scholars of western history, to have been born on the eve of the Civil War in an Irish neighborhood in New York City, at 70 Allen Street. If indeed his birthplace was New York, no records that prove that he ever lived there have ever been uncovered.

While it’s not known for sure who his biological father was, some researchers have theorized that his name was Patrick McCarty, Michael McCarty, William McCarty, or Edward McCarty.

His mother’s name was Catherine McCarty – although there have been continuing debates about whether McCarty was her maiden or married name. She is believed to have emigrated from Ireland to New York during the time of the Great Famine.

In 1868 Catherine McCarty moved with her two young sons, William Henry and Joseph, to Indianapolis, Indiana. There she met William Antrim, who was 12 years her junior.

In 1873, after several years of moving around the country, the two were married at the First Presbyterian Church in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and settled further south in Silver City. Antrim found work as a bartender and carpenter, but then became involved in prospecting and gambling as a way to make a living, and during that period spent very little time at home with his wife and stepsons.

McCarty’s mother reportedly washed clothes, baked pies, and took in boarders in order to provide for herself and her sons. Boarders and neighbors remembered her as a jolly Irish lady, full of life and mischief, but she was already in the final stages of tuberculosis when the family reached Silver City.

On September 16, 1874, Catherine McCarty died; she was buried in the Memory Lane Cemetery in Silver City.

Orphan, and Fugitive

At age 14 McCarty was taken in by a neighboring family who operated a hotel where he worked to pay for his keep. The manager was impressed by the youth, contending that he was the only young man who ever worked for him who did not steal anything.

Forced to seek new lodgings when his foster family began to experience domestic problems, McCarty moved into a boarding house and pursued odd jobs.

In April 1875, McCarty was arrested by Grant County Sheriff Harvey Whitehill for stealing cheese.
Sheriff Whitehill would later say that he liked the boy, and his acts of theft were more due to necessity than wantonness.

On September 24, 1875, McCarty was arrested again, when found in possession of clothing and firearms that a fellow boarder had stolen from a Chinese laundry owner. Two days after McCarty was placed in jail, the teenager escaped up the jailhouse chimney. From that point on McCarty was more or less a fugitive.

Risky Businesses

In 1876 McCarty settled in the vicinity of the Fort Grant Army Post in Arizona, where he worked on ranches and tested his skills at local gaming houses.

During this time McCarty became acquainted with John R. Mackie, a Scottish-born ex-cavalry private with a criminal bent. The two men supposedly became involved in the risky, but profitable, enterprise of horse thievery.

McCarty, who stole from local soldiers, became known by the name of “Kid Antrim”. Biographer Robert M. Utley writes that the nickname arose because of McCarty’s slight build and beardless countenance, his young years, and his appealing personality.

In 1877 McCarty was involved in a conflict with the civilian blacksmith at Fort Grant, an Irish immigrant named Frank “Windy” Cahill, who took pleasure in bullying the young McCarty. On August 17, Cahill reportedly attacked McCarty after a verbal exchange and threw him to the ground. Reliable accounts say that McCarty retaliated by shooting Cahill, who died the next day.

The coroner’s inquest concluded that McCarty’s shooting of Cahill was criminal and unjustifiable. Some of those who witnessed the incident later claimed that McCarty acted in self-defense.

Fugitive, Again

In fear of Cahill’s friends, McCarty fled the Arizona Territory and entered the New Mexico Territory. He eventually arrived at the former army post of Apache Tejo, where he joined a band of cattle rustlers who raided the sprawling herds of cattle magnate John Chisum.

McCarty rode for a time with the gang of rustlers (known as the Jesse Evans Gang), but then turned up at Heiskell Jones’s house in Pecos Valley, New Mexico.

According to one account, Apaches stole McCarty’s horse, forcing him to walk many miles to the nearest settlement – which happened to be Jones’s home.

When he arrived, the young man was supposedly near death, but Mrs. Jones nursed him back to health. The Jones family developed a strong attachment to McCarty, and gave him one of their horses.

At some point in 1877, McCarty began to refer to himself as “William H. Bonney”.

The Left-Handed Gun?

One of the few artifacts of McCarty’s life is a 2×3 inch ferrotype taken by an unknown photographer sometime in late 1879 or early 1880. It is the only image of McCarty that scholars agree is authentic.

McCarty (or Bonney, the name he used at the height of his notoriety) was 5’8″ (173 cm) tall with blue eyes, a smooth complexion, and prominent front teeth.

The photograph of The Kid, commonly known as the Upham tintype – after its longtime owner Frank Upham – was the subject of intense study by experts in the late 1980s. The experts concluded that the Colt revolver carried by McCarty was probably not his primary weapon, since his holster is not the type normally associated with gunslingers. Rather, it is a common holster, with a safety strap across the top to keep the six-shooter from bouncing out. McCarty’s main weapon appears to be the Winchester Carbine held in his hand in the ferrotype.

It was widely assumed throughout much of the 20th century that Billy the Kid was left-handed. This perception was encouraged by the above mentioned photograph of McCarty, in which he appears to be wearing a gun belt with a holster on his left side, but further examination revealed that as all Winchester Model 1873 rifles were made with the loading gate on the right side of the receiver, the “left-handed” photograph is in fact a mirror image.

A closer look at the ferrotype confirms that the prong on the Kid’s belt buckle points the wrong way, and the buttons on the Kid’s vest are on the left side – the side reserved for ladies’ blouses. The convention for men’s wear is that buttons go down the right side.

Michael Wallis wrote in 2007 that McCarty was ambidextrous. This observation seems to be supported by newspaper accounts of the time reporting that Billy the Kid could shoot handguns “with his left hand as accurately as he does with his right” and that “his aim with a revolver in each hand, shooting simultaneously, is unerring.”

The Lincoln County War

In 1877, McCarty (now widely known as William Bonney) moved to Lincoln County, New Mexico, and was hired by Doc Scurlock and Charlie Bowdre to work in their cheese factory. Through them, he met Frank Coe, George Coe and Ab Saunders, three cousins who owned their own ranch near the ranch of Richard M. Brewer. After a short stint working on the ranch of Henry Hooker, McCarty began working on the Coe-Saunders ranch.

Late in 1877, McCarty, along with Brewer, Bowdre, Scurlock, the Coes and Saunders, was hired as a cattle guard by John Tunstall, an English cattle rancher, banker and merchant, and his partner, Alexander McSween, a prominent lawyer.

A conflict known today as the Lincoln County War had erupted between the established town merchants, Lawrence Murphy and James Dolan, and competing business interests headed by Tunstall and McSween.

Before the arrival of Tunstall and McSween, Murphy and Dolan had presided over a monopoly of Lincoln County’s cattle and merchant trade.

Their far-reaching operation was known locally as “The House”, after a large mansion in Lincoln that served as Murphy and Dolan’s headquarters. There was also an ethnic element to the House’s conflict with Tunstall; Murphy and Dolan, both Irish immigrants, were strongly opposed to an Englishman like Tunstall cutting into their business.

Events turned bloody on February 18, 1878, when Tunstall was spotted while driving a herd of nine horses towards Lincoln and murdered by William Morton, Jesse Evans, Tom Hill, Frank Baker, and Sheriff William J. Brady of Lincoln County – all members of a posse serving the House, sent to attack McSween’s holdings.

After murdering Tunstall, the gunmen shot down his prized bay horse.
“As a wry and macabre joke on Tunstall’s great affection for horses, the dead bay’s head was then pillowed on his hat”, writes Frederick Nolan, Tunstall’s biographer.

Evidence at the scene suggested that Tunstall attempted to avoid a confrontation before he was shot down.

Tunstall’s murder enraged McCarty and the other ranch hands.

The Regulators

McSween, who abhorred violence, took steps to punish Tunstall’s murderers through legal means; he obtained warrants for their arrests from the local justice of the peace, John B. Wilson.

Tunstall’s men had other ideas.

They formed their own group, called the Regulators. After being deputized by Brewer, Tunstall’s foreman (who had been appointed a special constable and given the warrant to arrest Tunstall’s killers), they proceeded to the Murphy-Dolan store.

The wanted men, Bill Morton and Frank Baker, attempted to flee, but were captured on March 6.

Upon returning to Lincoln, the Regulators reported that Morton and Baker had been shot on March 9 near Agua Negra, during an alleged escape attempt.

During their journey to Lincoln, the Regulators also killed one of their own members, a man named McCloskey, whom they suspected of being a traitor.

On the day that McCloskey, Morton, and Baker were slain, Governor Samuel Beach Axtell arrived in Lincoln County to investigate the ongoing violence. The governor, accompanied by James Dolan and associate John Riley, proved hostile to the faction now headed by McSween.

The Regulators “went from lawmen to outlaws”.

Settling Scores

The Regulators planned to settle a score with Sheriff William J. Brady, who had arrested McCarty and fellow deputy Fred Waite in the aftermath of Tunstall’s murder. At the time Brady arrested them, the two men were trying to serve a warrant on him for his suspected role in looting Tunstall’s store after the Englishman’s death, as well as against his posse members for the murder of Tunstall.

On April 1, the Regulators Jim French, Frank McNab, John Middleton, Fred Waite, Henry Brown and McCarty/Bonney ambushed Sheriff Brady and his deputy, George W. Hindman, killing them both in Lincoln’s main street.

McCarty was shot in the thigh while attempting to retrieve a rifle that Brady had seized from him during an earlier arrest.

With this move, the Regulators disillusioned many former supporters, who came to view both sides as “equally nefarious and bloodthirsty”.

On April 4, in what became known as the Gunfight of Blazer’s Mills, the Regulators sought the arrest of Buckshot Roberts, a former buffalo hunter whom they suspected of involvement in the Tunstall murder. Roberts refused to be taken alive, though he had suffered a severe bullet wound to the chest.

During the gun battle, he shot and killed the Regulators’ leader, Dick Brewer. Four other Regulators were wounded in the skirmish.

The incident had the effect of further alienating the public, as many local residents “admired the way Roberts put up a gutsy fight against overwhelming odds.”

The Killing of Frank McNab and Its Aftermath

After Brewer’s death, the Regulators elected Frank McNab as captain. For a short period, they benefited from the appointment of Sheriff John Copeland, who proved sympathetic to their cause.

However, Copeland’s authority was undermined by the House, which recruited members from among Brady’s former deputies.

On April 29, 1878, a posse including the Jesse Evans Gang and the Seven Rivers Warriors, under the direction of former Brady deputy George W. Peppin, engaged McNab, Ab Saunders and Frank Coe in a shootout at the Fritz Ranch. They killed McNab, severely wounded Saunders and captured Coe. Coe escaped custody a short time later.

The next day the Regulators took up defensive positions in the town of Lincoln, where they traded shots with Dolan’s men as well as U.S. cavalrymen.

The only casualty was Dutch Charley Kruling, a House gunman wounded by a rifle slug fired by George Coe. But by shooting at US government troops, the Regulators had gained a new set of enemies.

On May 15, the Regulators tracked down Seven Rivers Warriors gang member Manuel Segovia, the suspected murderer of Frank McNab, and killed him. Around the time of Segovia’s death, the Regulators gained a new member, a young Texas “cowpoke” named Tom O’Folliard, who became McCarty’s close friend and constant companion.

The Regulators’ position worsened when the governor, in a quasi-legal move, removed Copeland and appointed House ally George Peppin as sheriff.

Under indictment for the Brady killing, McCarty and the other Regulators spent the next several months in hiding and were trapped, along with McSween, in McSween’s home in Lincoln on July 15, by members of the House and some of Brady’s men.

On July 19, a column of U.S. cavalry soldiers entered the fray. Although the soldiers were supposed to be neutral, their actions favored the Dolan faction.

After a five-day siege, the posse set McSween’s house on fire. McCarty and the other Regulators fled. The posse shot McSween when he escaped the fire, essentially marking the end of the Lincoln County War.

Lew Wallace and Amnesty

In the Autumn of 1878, the president appointed Lew Wallace, a former Union Army general, as Governor of the New Mexico Territory.

In an effort to restore peace to Lincoln County, Wallace proclaimed an amnesty for any man involved in the Lincoln County War who was not already under indictment.

McCarty, who had fled to Texas after his escape from McSween’s house, was under indictment, but sent Wallace a letter requesting immunity in return for testifying in front of the Grand Jury.

In March 1879, Wallace and McCarty met in Lincoln County to discuss the possibility of a deal. McCarty greeted the governor with a revolver in one hand and a Winchester rifle in the other. After taking several days to consider Wallace’s offer, McCarty agreed to testify in return for amnesty.

The arrangement called for McCarty to submit to a token arrest and a short stay in jail until the conclusion of his courtroom testimony. Although McCarty’s testimony helped to indict John Dolan, the district attorney (one of the powerful “House” faction leaders) disregarded Wallace’s order to set McCarty free after his testimony.

After the Dolan trial, McCarty and O’Folliard escaped on horses supplied by friends.

On The Run – Again

For the next year-and-a-half, McCarty survived by rustling, gambling, and taking defensive action.

In January 1880, he reportedly killed a man named Joe Grant in a Fort Sumner saloon. Grant, who did not realize who his opponent was, boasted that he would kill “Billy the Kid” if he ever encountered him.

In those days people loaded their revolvers with only five rounds, with the hammer down on an empty chamber. This was done to prevent an accidental discharge should the hammer be struck.

The Kid asked Grant if he could see his ivory-handled revolver and, while looking at the weapon, rotated the cylinder so the hammer would fall on the empty chamber when the trigger was pulled. He told Grant his identity. When Grant fired, nothing happened, and McCarty shot him. When asked about the incident later, he remarked, “It was a game for two, and I got there first.”

In another version of this story, biographer, Joel Jacobsen describes Grant as a “drunk” who was “making himself obnoxious in a bar”. The Kid is described as rotating the cylinder “so an empty chamber was beneath the hammer”. In Jacobsen’s recounting of the incident, Grant tried to shoot McCarty in the back. “As he was leaving the saloon, his back turned to Grant, he heard a distinct click. He spun around before Grant could reach a loaded chamber. Always a good marksman, he shot Grant in the chin.”

In November 1880, a posse pursued and trapped McCarty’s gang inside a ranch house owned by his friend James Greathouse at Anton Chico in the White Oaks area.

James Carlyle of the posse entered the house under a white flag, in an effort to negotiate the group’s surrender. Greathouse was sent out to act as a hostage for the posse.

At some point in the evening, Carlyle evidently decided the outlaws were stalling. According to one version, Carlyle heard a shot that had been fired accidentally outside. Concluding that the posse had shot down Greathouse, he chose escape, crashed through a window and was fired upon and killed.

Recognizing their mistake, the posse became demoralized and scattered, enabling McCarty and his gang to slip away. McCarty vehemently denied shooting Carlyle, and later wrote to Governor Wallace, claiming to be innocent of this crime and others attributed to him.

Pat Garrett

Around this time, McCarty became acquainted with an ambitious local bartender and former buffalo hunter named Pat Garrett. While popular accounts often depict McCarty and Garrett as “bosom buddies”, there is no evidence that they were friends.

Running on a pledge to rid the area of rustlers, Garrett was elected as sheriff of Lincoln County in November 1880.

In early December, he assembled a posse and set out to arrest McCarty, at that time known almost exclusively as “Billy the Kid.” The Kid then carried a $500 bounty on his head that had been authorized by governor Lew Wallace.

On December 19, McCarty barely escaped a midnight ambush in Fort Sumner, which left one member of the gang, Tom O’Folliard, dead.

On December 23, the Kid was tracked to an abandoned stone building located in a remote location known as Stinking Springs (near present-day Taiban, New Mexico). While McCarty and his gang were asleep inside, Garrett’s posse surrounded the building and waited for sunrise.

The next morning, a cattle rustler named Charlie Bowdre stepped outside to feed his horse. Mistaken for McCarty, he was shot down by the posse. Soon afterward, somebody from within the building reached for the horse’s halter rope, but Garrett shot and killed the horse, whose body blocked the building’s only exit.

As the lawmen began to cook breakfast over an open fire, Garrett and McCarty engaged in a friendly exchange, with Garrett inviting McCarty outside to eat, and McCarty inviting Garrett to “go to hell.” Realizing that they had no hope of escape, the besieged and hungry outlaws finally surrendered and were allowed to join in the meal.

Escape from Lincoln

McCarty was transported from Fort Sumner to Las Vegas, where he gave an interview to a reporter from the Las Vegas Gazette. Next, the prisoner was transferred to Santa Fe, where he sent four separate letters over the next three months to Governor Wallace seeking clemency. Wallace, however, refused to intervene, and the Kid’s trial was held in April 1881 in Mesilla.

On April 9, after two days of testimony, McCarty was found guilty of the murder of Sheriff Brady – the only conviction ever secured against any of the combatants in the Lincoln County War. On April 13, he was sentenced by Judge Warren Bristol to hang.

With his execution scheduled for May 13, McCarty was removed to Lincoln, where he was held under guard by two of Garrett’s deputies, James Bell and Robert Ollinger, on the top floor of the town courthouse.

On April 28, while Garrett was out of town, McCarty stunned the territory by killing both of his guards and escaping.

The details of the escape are unclear. Some researchers believe that a sympathizer placed a pistol in a nearby privy that McCarty was permitted to use, under escort, each day. McCarty retrieved the gun, and turned it on Bell when the pair had reached the top of a flight of stairs in the courthouse. Another theory holds that McCarty slipped off his manacles at the top of the stairs, struck Bell over the head with them, grabbed Bell’s own gun, and shot him with it.

In any event, Bell staggered down the stairs, dying as he fell. McCarty scooped up Ollinger’s 10-gauge double-barrel shotgun. Both barrels had been fully loaded with buckshot earlier by Ollinger himself.

The Kid waited at the upstairs window for his second guard, who had been across the street with some other prisoners, to respond to the gunshot and come to Bell’s aid. As Ollinger came running into view, McCarty leveled the shotgun at him, called out “Hello Bob!” and killed him.

The Kid’s escape was delayed for an hour while he worked free of his leg irons with a pickaxe, and then the young outlaw mounted a horse and rode out of town, reportedly singing. The horse returned two days later.

The Death of Billy the Kid

Sheriff Pat Garrett responded to rumors that McCarty was lurking in the vicinity of Fort Sumner almost three months after his escape.

Garrett and two deputies set out on July 14, 1881, to question one of the town’s residents, a friend of McCarty’s named Pedro “Pete” Maxwell (son of the land baron Lucien Maxwell). Close to midnight, as Garrett and Maxwell sat talking in Maxwell’s darkened bedroom, McCarty unexpectedly entered the room.

There are at least two versions of what happened next.

One version suggests that as the Kid entered, he failed to recognize Garrett in the poor light. McCarty drew his pistol and backed away, asking “Quién es? Quién es?” (Spanish for “Who is it? Who is it?”). Recognizing McCarty’s voice, Garrett drew his own pistol and fired twice, the first bullet striking McCarty in the chest just above his heart, the second one missing, and striking the mantle behind him. McCarty fell to the floor, gasped for a minute, and died.

In the second version, McCarty entered carrying a knife, evidently headed to a kitchen area. He noticed someone in the darkness, and uttered the words, “Quién es? Quién es?” at which point he was shot and killed.

Although the popularity of the first story persists, and portrays Garrett in a better light, some historians contend that the second version is probably the accurate one.

A markedly different theory, in which Garrett and his posse set a trap for McCarty, has also been suggested. Most recently explored in the 2004 Discovery Channel documentary, Billy the Kid: Unmasked, this version says that Garrett went to the bedroom of Pedro Maxwell’s sister, Paulita, and bound and gagged her in her bed. When McCarty arrived, Garrett was waiting behind Paulita’s bed and shot the Kid.

Dead, or Alive?

Rumors persist that Billy the Kid was not killed that night, but that Garrett (a known friend of the Kid’s) may have staged it all so the Kid could escape the law.

Several men claimed to be McCarty over the years, and at least two became notable because they were successful in persuading a small segment of the public.

In 1949, a paralegal named William Morrison located a man in Central Texas named Ollie Partridge Roberts (nicknamed Brushy Bill), who claimed to be Billy the Kid and challenged the popular account of McCarty as shot to death by Pat Garrett in 1881. Brushy Bill’s story was further promoted by the 1990 film Young Guns II, as well as a 2011 episode of Brad Meltzer’s Decoded, on the History Channel.

Another individual who allegedly claimed to be Billy the Kid was John Miller, whose family supported his claim in 1938, some time after Miller’s death. Miller was buried at the state-owned Pioneers’ Home Cemetery in Prescott, Arizona.

Tom Sullivan, a former sheriff of Lincoln County, and Steve Sederwall, a former mayor of Capitan, disinterred the bones of John Miller in May 2005. Though Sederwall and Sullivan believed the exhumation was allowed, official permission had not been given.

DNA samples from the remains were sent to a lab in Dallas, Texas, to be compared with traces of blood obtained from a bench that was believed to be the one upon which McCarty’s body was placed after he was shot to death. To date, no DNA test results have been made public.

As of 2008, a lawsuit is pending against officials in Lincoln County that would, if successful, publicize the results of those tests, along with other evidence that Sullivan and Sederwall collected.

So, who knows?

That’s it, for this one.

I hope you’ll join me, for our next installment.

Till then.

Peace.

The Gunfighters: Bat Masterson

William Barclay “Bat” Masterson (November 26, 1853 – October 25, 1921) was a noted figure of the American Old West.

Known as a buffalo hunter, U.S. Marshal and Army scout, avid fisherman, gambler, frontier lawman, sports editor and columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph, he was the brother of lawmen James Masterson and Ed Masterson.

The actor Gene Barry played Bat Masterson in a U.S. television series loosely based on the historical character. The show ran on NBC in 107 episodes from 1958 to 1961, and featured Masterson as a superbly dressed gambler, generally outfitted in a black suit and derby hat, who was more inclined to “bat” crooks over the head with his gold-knobbed cane than shoot them.

Here’s a taste of what the show was like (video comes courtesy of YouTube):

And here’s what history has to tell us about the man:

His Early Years

William Barclay Masterson was born on November 26, 1853, at Henryville, Canada East, in the Eastern Townships of what is today Quebec, and was baptized as Bartholomew Masterson. He adopted the forename William Barclay, in later life.

His father, Thomas Masterson (or Mastersan), was born in Canada, of an Irish family; and his mother, Catherine McGurk (or McGureth), was born in Ireland.

William was the second child in a family of five brothers and two sisters. They were raised on farms in Quebec, New York, and Illinois, until they finally settled near Wichita, Kansas.

In his late teens, he and two of his brothers, Ed Masterson and James Masterson, left their family’s farm to become buffalo hunters.

While traveling without his brothers, Bat took part in the Battle of Adobe Walls in Texas, and killed Comanche Indians. He then spent time as a U.S. Army scout in a campaign against the Kiowa and Comanche Indians.

Gunfighter

His first gunfight took place in 1876 in Sweetwater, Texas (later Mobeetie in Wheeler County).

Bat was attacked by a soldier, Corporal Melvin A. King – allegedly because of a girl. The girl in question, Mollie Brennan, stopped one of King’s bullets and was killed.

King (whose real name was Anthony Cook) died of his wounds.

Masterson was shot in the pelvis, but recovered. The story that he needed to carry a cane for the rest of his life is a legend perpetuated by the TV series starring the late Gene Barry.

Lawman

In 1877, he joined his brothers in Dodge City, Kansas. Jim was the partner of Ed, who was an assistant marshal.

Soon after his arrival, Masterson came into conflict with the local marshal over the treatment of a man being arrested. He was jailed and fined, although his fine was later returned by the city council.

He served as a sheriff’s deputy alongside Wyatt Earp, and within a few months was elected county sheriff of Ford County, Kansas.

As sheriff, Bat won plaudits for capturing four members of the Mike Roark gang, who had unsuccessfully held up a train at nearby Kinsley.

He also led the posse that captured Jim Kenedy – who had inadvertently killed an entertainer named Dora Hand in Dodge. Masterson brought Kenedy down with a shot through the shoulder.

Masterson continued as Ford County sheriff until he was voted out of office in 1879. During this same period his brother Ed was Marshal of Dodge City and died in the line of duty on April 9, 1878.

Ed was shot by a cowboy named Jack Wagner – who was unaware that Bat was in the vicinity.

As Ed stumbled away from the scene, Masterson responded from across the street with deadly force, firing on both Wagner and Wagner’s boss, Alf Walker. Wagner died the next day but Walker was taken back to Texas and recovered.

Tombstone

For the next several years, Bat made a living as a gambler moving through several of the legendary towns of the Old West.

Wyatt Earp invited Masterson to Tombstone, Arizona Territory, in early 1881.

Earp owned a one-quarter interest in the gambling concession at the Oriental Saloon, in exchange for his services as a manager and enforcer. He wanted Bat’s help running the faro tables in the Oriental.

Bat remained until April 1881, when he received an unsigned telegram that compelled him to immediately return to Dodge City:

COME AT ONCE. UPDEGRAFF AND PEACOCK ARE GOING TO KILL JIM.

Battle of the Plaza

Jim Masterson was in partnership with A. J. Peacock in Dodge City’s Lady Gay Saloon and Dance Hall. Al Updegraff was Peacock’s brother-in-law and bartender.

Jim thought Updegraff was dishonest and a drunk, and demanded that Peacock fire Updegraff, which Peacock refused to do. Their disagreement grew until threats flew, at which time Bat received the telegram.

Masterson got the next stagecoach out of Tombstone and arrived in Dodge City on April 16.

Jumping off the train before it stopped, Masterson saw Updegraff and Peacock. He accosted them.

Recognizing Bat, the two retreated behind the jail, and the three began exchanging gunfire.

Citizens ran for cover as bullets ripped through the Long Branch Saloon. Other individuals began firing in support of both sides until Updegraff was shot.

Mayor Ab Webster arrested Masterson, and only then did he learn that his brother Jim was fine.

Updegraff slowly recovered, and since it could not be determined who shot Updegraff, Masterson was fined $8.00 and released.

Updegraff and Peacock did not explain why they were headed towards the train depot, guns under their coats.

The citizens were outraged, warrants were issued, but Bat and Jim were permitted to leave Dodge.

Denver, Colorado

In 1888 Masterson was living in Denver, Colorado, where he dealt faro for “Big Ed” Chase at the Arcade gambling house.

That same year, he managed and then purchased the Palace Variety Theater. It was probably there that Bat first met an Indian club swinger and singer called Emma Moulton, born as Emma Walter near Philadelphia in 1857. The pair subsequently lived together, and it has been widely reported that they married in Denver on 21 November 1891. Although no record of the marriage has come to light thus far (and Emma was not divorced from her first husband until 9 November 1893), the partnership was to survive until Bat’s death.

While in Denver, Bat also met and maintained a long term friendship with the infamous confidence man, Soapy Smith, and members of the Soap Gang.
In 1889 the two friends were involved together in the famous Denver registration and election fraud scandal.

Travels, West

In 1892 Bat moved to the silver boom town of Creede, Colorado, where he managed the Denver Exchange Club until the town was destroyed by fire. On the 1900 Federal Census record for Arapahoe County in Denver he lists his name as William Masterson with his birthplace as Missouri in 1854. His wife is listed as Emma Masterson married for 10 years and he lists his occupation as Athletic Club Keeper.

Bat continued to travel around the boom towns of the West, gambling and promoting prize fights. He began writing a weekly sports column for George’s Weekly, a Denver newspaper, and opened the Olympic Athletic Club to promote the sport of boxing.

New York: A Call to Service

Masterson left the West and went to New York City by 1902, where he was arrested for illegal gambling

Some time later, President Theodore Roosevelt, on the recommendation of mutual friend Alfred Henry Lewis, appointed Masterson to the position of deputy to U.S. Marshal for the southern district of New York, under William Henkel. Roosevelt had met Masterson on several occasions and had become friendly with him.

Masterson split his time between his writing and keeping the peace in the grand jury room whenever the U. S. Attorney in New York held session. He performed this service for about $2,000 per year from early 1908 until 1912, when President William Howard Taft removed Masterson from the position during Taft’s purge of Roosevelt supporters from government positions.

Newspaper Man

Bat Masterson’s career as a writer started around 1883, and ended at his death in New York City in 1921. He worked as a sports writer and editor; and a columnist.

He wrote a letter published in the Daily Kansas State Journal, on June 9, 1883, that mentioned his arrival in Dodge City, the famous Long Branch saloon, and his famous cohorts who made the Long Branch their headquarters during the so-called “Dodge City Saloon War.” It was during this time that Bat met newspapermen Alfred Henry and William Eugene Lewis.

Masterson penned a weekly sports column for George’s Weekly sometime after his arrival in Denver, Colorado, in the late 1890s.

Masterson continued his writing career in New York at the New York Morning Telegraph, (a sporting newspaper featuring race form and results, whose reputation was part of what was known as “a whore’s breakfast,” which consisted of a cigarette and the Morning Telegraph), c. 1904. Hired by the younger Lewis brother, William Eugene Lewis, he reprised his role as sports writer, later becoming the paper’s sports editor.

The politics, sporting events, theaters, fine dining establishments, and varied night life of his adopted city became fodder for his thrice weekly column “Masterson’s Views on Timely Topics” for more than 18 years.

W. E. Lewis eventually became the general manager and president of the company and promoted his friend Masterson to vice president and company secretary.

The Latter Day Masterson

Alfred Henry Lewis eventually wrote several short stories and a novel, “The Sunset Trail”, about Masterson. He encouraged Bat to write a series of sketches about his adventures which were published by Lewis in the magazine he edited, Human Life (c. 1907–1908). Masterson regaled his readers with stories about his days on the frontier and his gunfighter friends. He also explained to his audience what he felt were the best properties of a gunfighter.

It was during this time that Masterson sold his famous six-gun -“the gun that tamed the West” – because he “needed the money.”

Actually, Masterson bought old guns at pawnshops, carved notches into the handles and sold them at inflated prices. Each time he claimed the gun was the one he used during his career as a lawman!

Bat Masterson’s Death

Bat Masterson died at age 67 on October 25, 1921, while living and working in New York City. He collapsed at his desk from a heart attack after penning what became his final column for the New York Morning Telegraph.

His body was taken to Campbell’s Funeral Parlor and later buried after a simple service in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York.

His full name, William Barclay Masterson, appears above his epitaph on the large granite grave marker in Woodlawn.

His epitaph states that he was “Loved by Everyone.”

I hope you loved this one.

And that you’ll join me, for the next.

Till then.

Peace.