Jack Kelly writer
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APALACHIN: HOW AMERICA MET THE MOB
(American Heritage, July 2000)
The day was mild for November; the blanket of sodden
clouds promised rain. By noon the hilltop estate was
fragrant with the prehistoric aroma of roasting meat. The
visitors, dressed in silk suits, white-on-white shirts,
gleaming shoes, and lush camel’s hair coats, looked
distinctly out of place in the tiny upstate New York hamlet
of Apalachin. “A meeting of George Rafts,” an observer
would note.
The dozens of men standing around the barbecue were
preparing to feast. A week before, their host had ordered
$432 worth of fancy steaks, veal chops, and hams from
Armour & Company in Binghamton. The 220-pound
shipment had to be sent in specially from Chicago.
As the men circulated and renewed acquaintances, a car
containing two police officers and two U.S. Treasury
agents rolled up the dirt road toward the open compound.
Neither the lawmen nor the houseguests realized that the
events about to unfold that day in 1957 would stamp the
name Apalachin on the history of crime in America and
shape for all time the public’s perception of the underworld.
Sgt. Edgar D. Croswell was a tall, severe forty-two-year-old
State Police veteran. Divorced, he lived in the trooper
barracks and devoted himself to his work. He was a
meticulous and thorough investigator. The day before, he
and his partner, Vincent Vasisko, had stopped by the
Parkway Motel in the town of Vestal to follow up on a bad-
check investigation. While Croswell conferred with the
motel manager in a back room, a young man entered the
lobby. Croswell made sure he was out of sight and listened
to the customer reserve three rooms for that night and the
next, requesting keys but not naming the occupants.
Croswell recognized the young man as the son of Joseph
Barbara, who owned the local Canada Dry Bottling
Company. Barbara had a reputation as a bootlegger and a
man of shady associations. On a hunch, Croswell and
Vasisko, patrolling in an unmarked car, drove past Barbara’
s lavish home a few miles away in Apalachin (pronounced
Ap-a-LAY-kin by the locals). They noted two cars unusual
for small-town New York, a coral-and-pink Lincoln and a
blue Cadillac with Ohio plates. Croswell, his instincts honed
by twelve years in the Criminal Investigation Division,
checked the Barbara place again after dark. He talked the
matter over with two investigators from the Federal Alcohol
and Tobacco Tax Division in nearby Binghamton. He
resolved to inquire further in the morning.
Gangsterism has added a subterranean stream to the
course of American history from the nation’s earliest days,
and more particularly since the rise of urban society in the
latter part of the nineteenth century. In the brash saloon
culture of the cities, street and youth gangs, like the Five
Pointers of New York and the Valley Gang in Chicago,
became allied with ward politicians, canvassing for votes in
exchange for protection from the police.
One element in this stew of corruption, vice, and violence
was a faction known as the Mafia. In Sicily the word
referred to an attitude that included defiance of authority,
loyalty to kin, and the settlement of disputes by vendetta or
by the arbitration of a village strongman. It was a state of
mind that had developed over centuries of misrule by
Spanish and Bourbon conquerors. Mafia was also applied
to bands of brigands that terrorized local peasants, at first
at the behest of landowners, then for their own benefit.
They established a solid base of power in Sicily during the
last quarter of the nineteenth century.
In America, Mafiosi mainly extorted money from vulnerable
Italian immigrants, a technique known as the “black hand.”
The public was suspicious of this secret, alien society but
saw no cause for general alarm.
The onset of Prohibition in 1920 marked the continental
divide in the history of organized crime. Lacking the will to
enforce the Volstead Act, Congress effectively assigned
an entire industry to the underworld. Prohibition served as
the gangsters’ higher education, demanding as it did
management skills, cooperation, planning, and high-level
political contacts. It moved the gangs far beyond their
neighborhood haunts. It eroded public respect for the law
and turned street thugs into millionaires. By the mid-1920s
the gangs, rather than serve the politicians as minions,
were giving orders to mayors and congressmen.
Endicott sits shoulder to shoulder with Binghamton and
Johnson City along the Susquehanna River near New York’
s border with Pennsylvania. In the early decades of this
century, the town attracted large numbers of Italian
immigrants with jobs in its shoe industry, which included
the big Endicott Johnson plant. One of the Sicilians who
landed there was Joseph Barbara, in whose activities
Sergeant Croswell took such an interest.
Barbara had been born in Castellammare del Golfo, a
Sicilian coastal town that gave rise to an entire clique of
the American mob. He came to America in 1921. His
several arrests on suspicion of murder in the early 1930s
mark him as a trigger-puller during the underworld turmoil
of the time.
Barbara’s record had been pretty clean since 1933, but
Croswell suspected he was using his soft drink and beer
operation to mask involvement in illicit alcohol. “Somehow I
felt he was the big mobster in our area,” Croswell said.
Barbara was known locally as a businessman with
connections. He gave heavily to charity. He lived in an
eighteen-room quarry-stone house. The Endicott police
chief had personally recommended him for a pistol permit.
His franchise to distribute Canada Dry soft drinks and
Gibbons beer was a lucrative one. During 1956 Barbara,
at fifty-one, had been weakened by heart disease. His son
Joseph, Jr., was overseeing the Canada Dry plant while
another son attended college.
Barbara’s background was typical of many of those who
gathered in Apalachin that day: early brushes with violence
and rumrunning, a later pose of respectability buttressed
by an interest in one or more legitimate businesses. It was
a path that paralleled the evolution of the underworld as a
whole. The twenties and early thirties were marked by
bloodshed as Irish, Jewish, and Italian gangs fought over
the bonanza of Prohibition. The violence peaked in 1931,
when Salvatore Maranzano scrambled to the top of the
heap in New York and declared himself “boss of all
bosses.”
Maranzano was the leader of the Castellammarese faction,
which included the gang leaders Joseph Bonanno and
Joseph Profaci of Brooklyn and Buffalo’s Stefano
Magaddino. Maranzano, who spoke six languages and was
an avid student of the works of Julius Caesar, viewed
himself in the tradition of the old-style Mafia strongmen. He
envisioned a gangland dominated by Italians, in which
territorial bosses, their followers ordered on the pattern of
Roman legions, would maintain a stable realm, honoring
their emperor.
Maranzano’s plan to organize the gangs into “regimes” of
“soldiers” headed by “capos” has long outlived him, as has
his arrangement of New York’s Italian gangs into five
“families.” Maranzano himself paid grievously for his
ambition.
His Cassius was Salvatore Lucania, better known as Lucky
Luciano. The young, forward-thinking Luciano saw the
advantage in alliances with non-Italian gangs and the need
for a high-level “commission” of gang bosses to replace
violence with arbitration; the disputes that arose in a world
without written contracts perpetually threatened
underworld stability. This rational New World view clashed
with Maranzano’s notions. Each man plotted against the
other. In September 1931, as Vincent (“Mad Dog”) Coll
was arriving at the New York Central Building on Park
Avenue to lay ambush for Luciano, killers hired by Luciano
and disguised as policemen walked into Maranzano’s office
there and left him lying dead.
The early years of the Depression saw a continued shake-
out in gangland. Other recalcitrant mobsters—Jack
(“Legs”) Diamond, Dutch Schultz, and Coll himself—died in
the bloodshed, but Luciano’s ideas soon caught on. By the
mid-1930s Luciano, along with his boyhood pal Meyer
Lansky and the veteran gangster Frank Costello, had
brought a relative peace to the underworld that would last
two decades. Says the historian John H. Davis, author of
Mafia Dynasty: “What Luciano accomplished was to
Americanize and democratize the old Sicilian Mafia,”
turning it into “a huge, and fearsome, moneymaking
machine.”
At noon on Thursday, November 14, Sergeant Croswell,
Trooper Vasisko, and the two Alcohol Tax men drove up to
the Barbara home to pursue what they continued to think
was a bootlegging investigation. They found a number of
vehicles parked next to Barbara’s four-car garage. As they
wrote down license numbers, a dozen men strolled from
behind the building, where they had been eating sirloin
sandwiches, and stared at the officers. A few more broke
into an anxious trot as they headed for the big ranch-style
house.
Croswell and his men started to leave, but their curiosity
was further piqued by the sight of another almost two
dozen cars parked in a field behind Barbara’s horse barn.
What was going on here? They retreated down the hill to
an intersection a half-mile from the house and stopped to
talk over the situation. Because a bridge was out, the road
past Barbara’s place was a dead end.
Croswell decided to set up a roadblock and check anyone
who left. He sent Vasisko and one of the federal men back
for reinforcements.
If the public was primed for the revelations that would
surface at Apalachin, it was mainly due to groundwork laid
seven years earlier. In 1950 Estes Kefauver, a freshman
senator from Tennessee with a nose for publicity, decided
that probing a nationwide criminal conspiracy would further
the public good even as it boosted his own political
fortunes. The Kefauver Committee traveled to fourteen
cities during 1950 and 1951, compiling voluminous
amounts of testimony, fact, and opinion. The senators
uncovered bookmaking, numbers rackets, and illicit
casinos everywhere they went, and with the vice came the
inevitable political corruption.
The larger issue that emerged from the hearings was the
existence of a syndicate that controlled criminal activity
across the country. But Attorney General J. Howard
McGrath saw no evidence of a centralized conspiracy, and
neither did J. Edgar Hoover; the FBI director insisted that
the Mafia was pure fantasy.
Kefauver wavered at first, but in the end he declared flatly,
“A national crime syndicate does exist in the United States
of America.…” The mob was, in fact, a “second
government” of pervasive power. “The Mafia…is no fairy
tale.”
The fifties were the golden age of organized crime.
Mobsters had invested their Prohibition lucre in gambling
enterprises; casinos in Las Vegas and Havana promised
steady streams of cash. The mob had leveraged its muscle
through labor and industrial rackets in fields like trucking,
construction, and apparel, extracting a private tax on a
wide range of products and services. Narcotics importation
yielded further treasure. Political contacts from the
twenties and thirties had matured: Mob lawyers had
become judges, judges senators. The underworld had
enjoyed its pax Luciano for more than twenty years. Two
shootings would break the peace and set the stage for
Apalachin.
In the 1940s Virgil W. Peterson, head of the Chicago
Crime Commission, had called Frank Costello “the lord of
the underworld of the entire United States.” Born
Francesco Castiglia, Costello had turned a fascination with
coin-operated devices into a slot-machine empire. His
notoriety hastened his downfall. After being raked across
the coals by Kefauver, Costello became a sitting duck for
government prosecutors and served more than a year in
jail for contempt. In the spring of 1957 he was out on
appeal and still trying to keep his hand on the tiller of his
criminal conglomerate. As such he represented a threat to
Vito Genovese, another long-time gang leader, who had
taken charge of Costello’s crime family two years earlier.
On the night of May 2, 1957, as Costello entered his
Central Park West apartment building, a man leaped at
him, shouted “This is for you, Frank,” and shot him in the
head. Costello dropped, his assassin ran.
The bullet, though, had only creased Costello’s skull.
When confronted with his alleged assailant, Vincent (“The
Chin”) Gigante, Costello claimed he had seen nothing. But
he heeded the eloquent message and retired from his
underworld business.
At Apalachin, Croswell was now watching a strange sight: a
dozen sharply dressed men running from Barbara’s house
across an open field, heading for a stand of pine trees. At
the same time, the small truck of a local fishmonger that
had been leaving Barbara’s property suddenly turned and
rushed back to the house. The driver, Bartholo Guccia, a
retired Endicott Johnson tanner with a criminal record and,
like Barbara, a Castellammare native, later explained that
he had returned to clarify a fish order, not to raise an
alarm.
Then a 1957 Chrysler Imperial approached the road-block.
Croswell ordered the car to stop and asked the men inside
to identify themselves and submit to a search. Among the
occupants was Vito Genovese. Croswell knew the name;
the newspapers called him “King of the Rackets.” He was
one of the most powerful gang leaders in the country.
A week shy of sixty at the time, Genovese had paid his
gangland dues. In the 1920s and 1930s, when Luciano
had supplied the underworld’s organizational acumen,
Lansky the brains, and Costello the political connections,
Genovese’s department had been the muscle. Early
photos show him with a square countenance of
concentrated ferocity, and even as a grandfather he
retained a face that could frighten. In 1957 Genovese was
angling for undisputed sway in the New York underworld.
Once Costello had been scared off, the major obstacle to
Genovese’s hegemony was another mob leader, Albert
Anastasia, who had also come up through the mayhem
department of the business. Anastasia, who ran a
Brooklyn-based Mafia family, exerted an iron control over
New York’s waterfront, and his gang had its fingers on a
majority of the imports into the U.S. East Coast.
Anastasia’s nickname—“Il Terremoto,” the Earthquake—
gives a clue to his disposition. In 1952 he watched a young
Brooklyn man named Arnold Schuster being congratulated
by police officers on television. Schuster had spotted and
turned in the bank robber and prison escapee Willie
Sutton. “I can’t stand squealers!” Anastasia supposedly
bellowed. A few days later Schuster was shot three times in
the head as he walked home from work.
Such antics raised questions in the underworld about
Anastasia’s stability. His alliance with Costello made him a
threat to Genovese. Also, he had lately been trying to
force an opening into the lucrative Havana casino
business that Lansky and others gangsters had neatly
divided up.
Anastasia paid for these sins in a spectacular way. Three
weeks before the Apalachin meeting he sat down in chair
number four of a barbershop in the Park Sheraton Hotel
on New York’s Seventh Avenue and asked for a trim. Two
masked men entered and started shooting. Il Terremoto
heaved himself from the chair, breaking the footrest. He
lurched toward the image of his killers in the mirror. Half
the shots went wild before one finally caught him in the
head.
Because the gun is the ultimate source of power in the
underworld, competition always has the potential of
exploding into unrestrained violence. Such a danger was
now at hand, and there was a consensus among mob
bosses that a meeting was needed to clear the air.
Genovese wanted to hold the conference in Chicago,
neutral ground for the contentious New York gangs. “Big
Steve” Magaddino, the Castellemmarese boss of Buffalo
and a man of considerable clout among the mob’s top
echelons, convinced him that the Barbara estate would be
a more secluded site. The Mafia Commission had held a
meeting in nearby Binghamton the year before with no
disturbances. For Magaddino the 1957 conclave was a
chance to demonstrate his influence and further boost his
prestige. Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana was later
heard on a wiretap chewing out Magaddino for the fiasco.
“I hope you’re satisfied,” he said. “Sixty-three of our top
guys made by the cops.”
Magaddino replied, “I gotta admit you were right, Sam. It
never would have happened in your place.”
Indeed, the carefully planned event was now going terribly
wrong. One of the enduring questions about the Apalachin
incident is why these men, veterans of bloody mob wars
and of numerous encounters with the law, panicked. They
were committing no crime; the police never closed in.
Maybe the unfamiliar wide-open spaces threw them off.
Maybe the dynamics of the crowd took over. Whatever the
reason, they ran.
Croswell knew now that he had uncovered something big.
As additional troopers arrived, he sent them to track down
the men who had scurried into the woods. Other officers
helped ferry the carloads of gangsters to the station. After
the first flurry the participants of the thwarted meeting tried
to exit a few at a time. Each car was detained as it left.
In one was Joe Profaci, the “Olive Oil King” and top man in
one of the five New York families. Another held Carlo
Gambino, whom Genovese had installed as head of
Anastasia’s faction, a reward to Gambino for betraying his
boss.
Croswell’s men picked up some of the nation’s most
notorious hoodlums in humbling circumstances. The long-
time Brooklyn mob boss Joe Bonanno was nabbed in a
cornfield. He would later claim that it wasn’t him at all but
someone who happened to have his driver’s license. The
Tampa kingpin Santo Traffkante, Jr., was more at home in
the nightclubs of Havana, where he played a key role in
the mob’s gambling empire, than in the dank woods of
upstate New York. He emerged from the woods with a
couple of confederates only to see a State Police car
approaching. The group turned tail; the troopers fired
several warning shots; the gangsters gave up.
Police took all the detainees to the substation in nearby
Vestal. “We gave them a rough time at the station house,”
Croswell said. “But we couldn’t even make them commit
disorderly conduct there.” The gangsters had to empty
their pockets and take off their shoes. Police found no
guns or contraband on any of the participants. The men
did carry a great deal of cash, a total of around three
hundred thousand dollars (one man, who had a roll worth
close to ten thousand, listed his occupation as
“unemployed”).
The final tally wasn’t complete until one o’clock the next
morning, an hour after the last of those who had run for
the woods was brought in from the rain. “One by one we
rounded them up,” Croswell said, “bedraggled, soaking
wet, and tired.” He added, “There are no sidewalks in the
woods.”
Sixty-five gangsters were taken at the roadblock or in the
surrounding area, and speculation placed as many as forty
more men on the attendance list. Barbara’s house was
never searched; any who did not flee could have waited
out the raid inside. About the reaction of those nabbed,
Croswell noted, “These guys are never indignant.” All of
them answered questions politely and left the station
quietly.
By the time Croswell processed the last of the men, he was
being swamped by calls from reporters. The following day
headlines blossomed in newspapers throughout the
country. Here at last was proof of what Kefauver had
warned about. Here was the “Grand Council” of the Mafia,
the nerve center of crime in America. The enemy had
finally been flushed into the open.
The police were immediately excoriated for releasing the
biggest catch of mobsters in history. Croswell’s critics
ignored the fact that the men, none of whom was a wanted
fugitive, were peacefully assembled on private property.
The police action was itself of questionable legality, since
there was no legitimate cause for suspicion.
Almost all the men stated that they had dropped by to pay
a sick call on Barbara, that their simultaneous arrival on a
Thursday morning had been sheer coincidence. John C.
Montana, a taxi-company owner and former city council-
man from Buffalo, was one of the few to give a more
complete explanation. He later testified that he had been
on his way to Pittstown, Pennsylvania, when his car’s
brakes had failed in Ithaca. He thought Barbara or
someone at his house could help fix them. While drinking
tea in Barbara’s home, he had noticed “some kind of party”
going on but didn’t inquire about it. At the shout of
“Roadblock!” he ran for the woods. He explained, ”…it was
just human nature that I would say to myself: what am I
doing here?”
Others were more accustomed to police roundups. Only 9
of those captured had no record. The remainder boasted
more than 275 arrests among them, 100 convictions. Their
sheets contained busts for gambling, narcotics, weapons
violations, bootlegging, and union rackets.
The list of attendees gave a snapshot of the underworld of
the time. The mob was aging. Al Capone had reached the
pinnacle of power while still in his twenties. The men at
Apalachin were survivors, wily veterans of Prohibition,
many of them in their fifties and sixties.
The meeting was emblematic of the ascendancy of the
Italian gangs in postwar organized crime. About half of the
guests were natives of southern Italy or Sicily; the rest had
been born in America of Italian heritage. Apalachin also
illustrated the degree to which kinship formed a glue that
held the underworld together—twenty-five of those picked
up were related to one or more of the other guests—and
provided a clue to the movement of the mob into legitimate
business. The garment trade was the most common
occupation detainees gave to police. State investigators
reported that Natale Evola, a Brooklyn cousin of Joe
Barbara’s wife, “is believed to exercise control over the
shoulder pad industry.” He was later indicted as a major
narcotics dealer. Eleven men listed their occupation as
olive oil and cheese importation; others operated bars and
restaurants, beer distributorships, and funeral homes.
While Apalachin was the most famous mob convention
ever held, it was far from the first. What made Apalachin
different from the earlier gatherings was its wholesale
discovery. “Secrecy,” Elias Canetti declares, “lies at the
very core of power.” Apalachin set in motion events that
would gradually strip the underworld of much of its
secrecy. That was what made the event a turning point
and in many senses a high-water mark for the mob.
“Apalachin was of enormous importance,” says the veteran
mob watcher Nicholas Pileggi, author of Wiseguys: Life in a
Mafia Family. “It proved that this wasn’t the fantasy that
many had thought. It made it harder for the lawyers and
apologists to deny the existence of organized crime. After
Apalachin the mob’s political support began to crack.
Gangsters are still active today in hijacking, loan-sharking,
and other activities; the difference is that they’ve lost the
official clout. They no longer appoint judges or state
senators.”
The power of the gang bosses rested on rispetto, the
mixture of respect and fear that the old Mafia dons had
employed to further their extortions. Ridicule was a peril.
The opera buffa of Apalachin made Vito Genovese a
laughingstock in the underworld. His fortunes never
recovered. Seventeen months after the meeting, the
government hit him with a fifteen-year sentence for
conspiracy to distribute narcotics. He died in jail ten years
later.
In 1957 organized crime was suddenly news. Each of the
Apalachin participants became the focus of publicity and
potential official action on his home turf. Attendance at the
meeting was taken as proof of involvement in a malignant
conspiracy. The public demanded to know why this
“second government,” now no longer invisible, was allowed
to exist. The authorities began to die for answers.
The New York legislature assigned a watchdog committee
to look into the matter. Grand juries probed for
wrongdoing. Paul Castellano, the chauffeur, brother-in-law,
and eventual successor to Carlo Gambino, served seven
months for his silence before a New York City panel.
Liquor and immigration authorities began to examine
participants. Joe Barbara, plagued by health problems,
never testified about the meeting, but he lost his pistol
permit and his beer license and soon after sold both his
house and business. When he died in 1959, only four of
the hordes of “well-wishers” from two years earlier made it
to his funeral.
On the federal level Apalachin came under the magnifying
glass of a Senate committee chaired by John McClellan of
Arkansas. The Senate Rackets Committee, as it was
known, had been digging up dirt on mob infiltration of labor
unions for nine months before Apalachin. Twenty-two of
the delegates to Apalachin had union or labor-
management ties. The hearings were driven by the group’s
chief counsel, Robert Kennedy. Genovese appeared
before the panel wearing amber-shaded glasses and took
the Fifth Amendment more than 150 times. McClellan’s
investigation proved to be an important step toward
cleaning up mob-dominated unions.
J. Edgar Hoover understood that Apalachin made a
mockery of his long-held position that no Mafia existed in
America. A few days in the wake of Apalachin, Hoover set
up a “Top Hoodlum Program,” using the bureau to
consolidate information on leading gangsters.
Various explanations have been put forth as to why Hoover
demonstrated such a blind spot when it came to gangland
realities, including a theory that the mob was blackmailing
him. It’s more likely that Hoover’s reasoning was closer to
what he so often stated: a notion that crime was a local
problem. He told the Kefauver committee that if state and
local laws were properly enforced, gambling would be
eliminated “within forty-eight hours.” Having kept his
agency clear of the debacle of Prohibition, Hoover had
long preached against turning the FBI into a national
police force.
Hoover’s instincts as a bureaucrat told him that effective
action against organized crime meant cooperation with
other federal agencies, a prospect he loathed. It also
meant diverting resources from his obsessive hunt for
domestic Communists. Whatever the reason, even after
Apalachin, Hoover continued to drag his feet on organized
crime. He squashed a Bureau report that detailed the
history of the underworld because it admitted the existence
of a syndicate. In 1959 the Bureau’s New York office still
had four hundred agents assigned to domestic security
details and only four looking into the mob.
Robert Kennedy lambasted the Eisenhower administration
that same year for its failure to prosecute gang bosses.
“The proof is the Apalachin convention,” he said. “Sixty top
gangsters were there, but no local, state, or federal officer
knew about it. It was discovered only by chance.…”
Hoover’s views began to shift even before Kennedy took
over the Justice Department, and by 1961 he had plunged
into the war on gangsterism with the zeal of a convert.
Convinced by Apalachin, Robert Kennedy remained an
intrepid foe of the mob during his tenure as Attorney
General. Insisting that the government needed to attack
organized crime “with weapons and techniques as effective
as their own,” he pushed five anti-mob bills through
Congress in 1961 and more than tripled the size of the
department’s organized-crime section. Kennedy’s
approach was all action. “Don’t define it,” he said, “do
something about it.” By 1963 the government had indicted
more than six hundred organized-crime figures.
That same year a portly man of fifty-eight with an iron gray
crew cut, a gangster for thirty-six years, went before
McClellan’s committee and became the first insider to sing
publicly about the mob. This was Joe Valachi, a soldier in
Genovese’s gang who believed that his boss had betrayed
him. Valachi became the Boswell of the Mafia, confirming
much of what was already suspected, putting together the
bricks of the story with the mortar of terminology and
anecdote.
One of the secrets that Valachi confirmed was that
mobsters never used the term Mafia. Instead they talked
vaguely of cosa nostra, “our thing.” FBI agents liked this.
They turned the reference into a proper name, La Cosa
Nostra, transformed it into an acronym, LCN, and thereby
saved face for their director. There was, as Hoover had
always claimed, no Mafia.
Apalachin also passed into the national vocabulary as a
synonym for the underworld. Newspaper columnists
referred to mobsters as “the Apalachin boys.” Every
subsequent gathering of gangsters was inevitably labeled
a “little Apalachin.”
Apalachin won Sergeant Croswell high praise for his
diligence and established him as an organized-crime
expert. He toured the nation talking about the underworld.
After retiring from the State Police as a captain in 1966, he
helped investigate corruption in the New York carting
industry, and during the 1970s he served as head of the
state’s Organized Crime Task Force.
The names of Apalachin’s attendees—Genovese,
Gambino, Profaci, and Bonanno—became touchstones of
organized crime. Carlo Gambino rose to become gangland’
s big cheese. His successor, Paul Castellano, who also
enjoyed a steak sandwich at Barbara’s home that day, was
among a bevy of mob leaders who in 1985 were indicted
under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations
Act. Their crime was membership in the Mafia Commission
itself, the once-secret Grand Council, whose membership
changes were now reported routinely in The New York
Times. When the conspirators were duly convicted and
sentenced to hundred-year terms, Castellano wasn’t
around to join them; he had been shot down in front of his
favorite New York steakhouse, a victim of his ambitious
successor, John Gotti.
By the mid-1990s Vito Genovese’s outfit, which could
boast Lucky Luciano among its succession of leaders, had
passed into the hands of a man who prosecutors alleged
had become the dean of mobsters. Convicted in 1997 for
racketeering and conspiracy to murder, he was none other
than Vincent (“The Chin”) Gigante, the onetime boxer
whose 1957 attempt to plug Frank Costello was a major
item on the Apalachin agenda.
In spite of the many revelations since Apalachin, the exact
nature of the underworld remains elusive. Like the blind
men with their elephant, observers perceive an organized
crime of their own construction. Government officials find a
second government. Law enforcement people see a
paramilitary structure not unlike their own. Experts draw up
organization charts with rigid chains of command.
Reformers find corrupt politicians, nativists ethnic
conspirators, moralists sinners.
None of the models exactly fits what Meyer Lansky’s
biographer Robert Lacey calls “the confused, fluid, and
essentially entrepreneurial character of most criminal
activity.” In a sense Apalachin left a false impression of a
distinct and easily definable mob ruled from the top. It fixed
in the public mind the image of shady men meeting to
direct a vast conspiracy. If that picture had been accurate,
perhaps we would not still be wrestling with a stubborn
organized-crime problem more than forty years after the
event. In reality the underworld, with its matrix of personal
influence, blood loyalties, intimidation, ad hoc enterprise,
and political connections, defies both categorical
description and easy remedy.
# # #
(American Heritage, July 2000)
The day was mild for November; the blanket of sodden
clouds promised rain. By noon the hilltop estate was
fragrant with the prehistoric aroma of roasting meat. The
visitors, dressed in silk suits, white-on-white shirts,
gleaming shoes, and lush camel’s hair coats, looked
distinctly out of place in the tiny upstate New York hamlet
of Apalachin. “A meeting of George Rafts,” an observer
would note.
The dozens of men standing around the barbecue were
preparing to feast. A week before, their host had ordered
$432 worth of fancy steaks, veal chops, and hams from
Armour & Company in Binghamton. The 220-pound
shipment had to be sent in specially from Chicago.
As the men circulated and renewed acquaintances, a car
containing two police officers and two U.S. Treasury
agents rolled up the dirt road toward the open compound.
Neither the lawmen nor the houseguests realized that the
events about to unfold that day in 1957 would stamp the
name Apalachin on the history of crime in America and
shape for all time the public’s perception of the underworld.
Sgt. Edgar D. Croswell was a tall, severe forty-two-year-old
State Police veteran. Divorced, he lived in the trooper
barracks and devoted himself to his work. He was a
meticulous and thorough investigator. The day before, he
and his partner, Vincent Vasisko, had stopped by the
Parkway Motel in the town of Vestal to follow up on a bad-
check investigation. While Croswell conferred with the
motel manager in a back room, a young man entered the
lobby. Croswell made sure he was out of sight and listened
to the customer reserve three rooms for that night and the
next, requesting keys but not naming the occupants.
Croswell recognized the young man as the son of Joseph
Barbara, who owned the local Canada Dry Bottling
Company. Barbara had a reputation as a bootlegger and a
man of shady associations. On a hunch, Croswell and
Vasisko, patrolling in an unmarked car, drove past Barbara’
s lavish home a few miles away in Apalachin (pronounced
Ap-a-LAY-kin by the locals). They noted two cars unusual
for small-town New York, a coral-and-pink Lincoln and a
blue Cadillac with Ohio plates. Croswell, his instincts honed
by twelve years in the Criminal Investigation Division,
checked the Barbara place again after dark. He talked the
matter over with two investigators from the Federal Alcohol
and Tobacco Tax Division in nearby Binghamton. He
resolved to inquire further in the morning.
Gangsterism has added a subterranean stream to the
course of American history from the nation’s earliest days,
and more particularly since the rise of urban society in the
latter part of the nineteenth century. In the brash saloon
culture of the cities, street and youth gangs, like the Five
Pointers of New York and the Valley Gang in Chicago,
became allied with ward politicians, canvassing for votes in
exchange for protection from the police.
One element in this stew of corruption, vice, and violence
was a faction known as the Mafia. In Sicily the word
referred to an attitude that included defiance of authority,
loyalty to kin, and the settlement of disputes by vendetta or
by the arbitration of a village strongman. It was a state of
mind that had developed over centuries of misrule by
Spanish and Bourbon conquerors. Mafia was also applied
to bands of brigands that terrorized local peasants, at first
at the behest of landowners, then for their own benefit.
They established a solid base of power in Sicily during the
last quarter of the nineteenth century.
In America, Mafiosi mainly extorted money from vulnerable
Italian immigrants, a technique known as the “black hand.”
The public was suspicious of this secret, alien society but
saw no cause for general alarm.
The onset of Prohibition in 1920 marked the continental
divide in the history of organized crime. Lacking the will to
enforce the Volstead Act, Congress effectively assigned
an entire industry to the underworld. Prohibition served as
the gangsters’ higher education, demanding as it did
management skills, cooperation, planning, and high-level
political contacts. It moved the gangs far beyond their
neighborhood haunts. It eroded public respect for the law
and turned street thugs into millionaires. By the mid-1920s
the gangs, rather than serve the politicians as minions,
were giving orders to mayors and congressmen.
Endicott sits shoulder to shoulder with Binghamton and
Johnson City along the Susquehanna River near New York’
s border with Pennsylvania. In the early decades of this
century, the town attracted large numbers of Italian
immigrants with jobs in its shoe industry, which included
the big Endicott Johnson plant. One of the Sicilians who
landed there was Joseph Barbara, in whose activities
Sergeant Croswell took such an interest.
Barbara had been born in Castellammare del Golfo, a
Sicilian coastal town that gave rise to an entire clique of
the American mob. He came to America in 1921. His
several arrests on suspicion of murder in the early 1930s
mark him as a trigger-puller during the underworld turmoil
of the time.
Barbara’s record had been pretty clean since 1933, but
Croswell suspected he was using his soft drink and beer
operation to mask involvement in illicit alcohol. “Somehow I
felt he was the big mobster in our area,” Croswell said.
Barbara was known locally as a businessman with
connections. He gave heavily to charity. He lived in an
eighteen-room quarry-stone house. The Endicott police
chief had personally recommended him for a pistol permit.
His franchise to distribute Canada Dry soft drinks and
Gibbons beer was a lucrative one. During 1956 Barbara,
at fifty-one, had been weakened by heart disease. His son
Joseph, Jr., was overseeing the Canada Dry plant while
another son attended college.
Barbara’s background was typical of many of those who
gathered in Apalachin that day: early brushes with violence
and rumrunning, a later pose of respectability buttressed
by an interest in one or more legitimate businesses. It was
a path that paralleled the evolution of the underworld as a
whole. The twenties and early thirties were marked by
bloodshed as Irish, Jewish, and Italian gangs fought over
the bonanza of Prohibition. The violence peaked in 1931,
when Salvatore Maranzano scrambled to the top of the
heap in New York and declared himself “boss of all
bosses.”
Maranzano was the leader of the Castellammarese faction,
which included the gang leaders Joseph Bonanno and
Joseph Profaci of Brooklyn and Buffalo’s Stefano
Magaddino. Maranzano, who spoke six languages and was
an avid student of the works of Julius Caesar, viewed
himself in the tradition of the old-style Mafia strongmen. He
envisioned a gangland dominated by Italians, in which
territorial bosses, their followers ordered on the pattern of
Roman legions, would maintain a stable realm, honoring
their emperor.
Maranzano’s plan to organize the gangs into “regimes” of
“soldiers” headed by “capos” has long outlived him, as has
his arrangement of New York’s Italian gangs into five
“families.” Maranzano himself paid grievously for his
ambition.
His Cassius was Salvatore Lucania, better known as Lucky
Luciano. The young, forward-thinking Luciano saw the
advantage in alliances with non-Italian gangs and the need
for a high-level “commission” of gang bosses to replace
violence with arbitration; the disputes that arose in a world
without written contracts perpetually threatened
underworld stability. This rational New World view clashed
with Maranzano’s notions. Each man plotted against the
other. In September 1931, as Vincent (“Mad Dog”) Coll
was arriving at the New York Central Building on Park
Avenue to lay ambush for Luciano, killers hired by Luciano
and disguised as policemen walked into Maranzano’s office
there and left him lying dead.
The early years of the Depression saw a continued shake-
out in gangland. Other recalcitrant mobsters—Jack
(“Legs”) Diamond, Dutch Schultz, and Coll himself—died in
the bloodshed, but Luciano’s ideas soon caught on. By the
mid-1930s Luciano, along with his boyhood pal Meyer
Lansky and the veteran gangster Frank Costello, had
brought a relative peace to the underworld that would last
two decades. Says the historian John H. Davis, author of
Mafia Dynasty: “What Luciano accomplished was to
Americanize and democratize the old Sicilian Mafia,”
turning it into “a huge, and fearsome, moneymaking
machine.”
At noon on Thursday, November 14, Sergeant Croswell,
Trooper Vasisko, and the two Alcohol Tax men drove up to
the Barbara home to pursue what they continued to think
was a bootlegging investigation. They found a number of
vehicles parked next to Barbara’s four-car garage. As they
wrote down license numbers, a dozen men strolled from
behind the building, where they had been eating sirloin
sandwiches, and stared at the officers. A few more broke
into an anxious trot as they headed for the big ranch-style
house.
Croswell and his men started to leave, but their curiosity
was further piqued by the sight of another almost two
dozen cars parked in a field behind Barbara’s horse barn.
What was going on here? They retreated down the hill to
an intersection a half-mile from the house and stopped to
talk over the situation. Because a bridge was out, the road
past Barbara’s place was a dead end.
Croswell decided to set up a roadblock and check anyone
who left. He sent Vasisko and one of the federal men back
for reinforcements.
If the public was primed for the revelations that would
surface at Apalachin, it was mainly due to groundwork laid
seven years earlier. In 1950 Estes Kefauver, a freshman
senator from Tennessee with a nose for publicity, decided
that probing a nationwide criminal conspiracy would further
the public good even as it boosted his own political
fortunes. The Kefauver Committee traveled to fourteen
cities during 1950 and 1951, compiling voluminous
amounts of testimony, fact, and opinion. The senators
uncovered bookmaking, numbers rackets, and illicit
casinos everywhere they went, and with the vice came the
inevitable political corruption.
The larger issue that emerged from the hearings was the
existence of a syndicate that controlled criminal activity
across the country. But Attorney General J. Howard
McGrath saw no evidence of a centralized conspiracy, and
neither did J. Edgar Hoover; the FBI director insisted that
the Mafia was pure fantasy.
Kefauver wavered at first, but in the end he declared flatly,
“A national crime syndicate does exist in the United States
of America.…” The mob was, in fact, a “second
government” of pervasive power. “The Mafia…is no fairy
tale.”
The fifties were the golden age of organized crime.
Mobsters had invested their Prohibition lucre in gambling
enterprises; casinos in Las Vegas and Havana promised
steady streams of cash. The mob had leveraged its muscle
through labor and industrial rackets in fields like trucking,
construction, and apparel, extracting a private tax on a
wide range of products and services. Narcotics importation
yielded further treasure. Political contacts from the
twenties and thirties had matured: Mob lawyers had
become judges, judges senators. The underworld had
enjoyed its pax Luciano for more than twenty years. Two
shootings would break the peace and set the stage for
Apalachin.
In the 1940s Virgil W. Peterson, head of the Chicago
Crime Commission, had called Frank Costello “the lord of
the underworld of the entire United States.” Born
Francesco Castiglia, Costello had turned a fascination with
coin-operated devices into a slot-machine empire. His
notoriety hastened his downfall. After being raked across
the coals by Kefauver, Costello became a sitting duck for
government prosecutors and served more than a year in
jail for contempt. In the spring of 1957 he was out on
appeal and still trying to keep his hand on the tiller of his
criminal conglomerate. As such he represented a threat to
Vito Genovese, another long-time gang leader, who had
taken charge of Costello’s crime family two years earlier.
On the night of May 2, 1957, as Costello entered his
Central Park West apartment building, a man leaped at
him, shouted “This is for you, Frank,” and shot him in the
head. Costello dropped, his assassin ran.
The bullet, though, had only creased Costello’s skull.
When confronted with his alleged assailant, Vincent (“The
Chin”) Gigante, Costello claimed he had seen nothing. But
he heeded the eloquent message and retired from his
underworld business.
At Apalachin, Croswell was now watching a strange sight: a
dozen sharply dressed men running from Barbara’s house
across an open field, heading for a stand of pine trees. At
the same time, the small truck of a local fishmonger that
had been leaving Barbara’s property suddenly turned and
rushed back to the house. The driver, Bartholo Guccia, a
retired Endicott Johnson tanner with a criminal record and,
like Barbara, a Castellammare native, later explained that
he had returned to clarify a fish order, not to raise an
alarm.
Then a 1957 Chrysler Imperial approached the road-block.
Croswell ordered the car to stop and asked the men inside
to identify themselves and submit to a search. Among the
occupants was Vito Genovese. Croswell knew the name;
the newspapers called him “King of the Rackets.” He was
one of the most powerful gang leaders in the country.
A week shy of sixty at the time, Genovese had paid his
gangland dues. In the 1920s and 1930s, when Luciano
had supplied the underworld’s organizational acumen,
Lansky the brains, and Costello the political connections,
Genovese’s department had been the muscle. Early
photos show him with a square countenance of
concentrated ferocity, and even as a grandfather he
retained a face that could frighten. In 1957 Genovese was
angling for undisputed sway in the New York underworld.
Once Costello had been scared off, the major obstacle to
Genovese’s hegemony was another mob leader, Albert
Anastasia, who had also come up through the mayhem
department of the business. Anastasia, who ran a
Brooklyn-based Mafia family, exerted an iron control over
New York’s waterfront, and his gang had its fingers on a
majority of the imports into the U.S. East Coast.
Anastasia’s nickname—“Il Terremoto,” the Earthquake—
gives a clue to his disposition. In 1952 he watched a young
Brooklyn man named Arnold Schuster being congratulated
by police officers on television. Schuster had spotted and
turned in the bank robber and prison escapee Willie
Sutton. “I can’t stand squealers!” Anastasia supposedly
bellowed. A few days later Schuster was shot three times in
the head as he walked home from work.
Such antics raised questions in the underworld about
Anastasia’s stability. His alliance with Costello made him a
threat to Genovese. Also, he had lately been trying to
force an opening into the lucrative Havana casino
business that Lansky and others gangsters had neatly
divided up.
Anastasia paid for these sins in a spectacular way. Three
weeks before the Apalachin meeting he sat down in chair
number four of a barbershop in the Park Sheraton Hotel
on New York’s Seventh Avenue and asked for a trim. Two
masked men entered and started shooting. Il Terremoto
heaved himself from the chair, breaking the footrest. He
lurched toward the image of his killers in the mirror. Half
the shots went wild before one finally caught him in the
head.
Because the gun is the ultimate source of power in the
underworld, competition always has the potential of
exploding into unrestrained violence. Such a danger was
now at hand, and there was a consensus among mob
bosses that a meeting was needed to clear the air.
Genovese wanted to hold the conference in Chicago,
neutral ground for the contentious New York gangs. “Big
Steve” Magaddino, the Castellemmarese boss of Buffalo
and a man of considerable clout among the mob’s top
echelons, convinced him that the Barbara estate would be
a more secluded site. The Mafia Commission had held a
meeting in nearby Binghamton the year before with no
disturbances. For Magaddino the 1957 conclave was a
chance to demonstrate his influence and further boost his
prestige. Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana was later
heard on a wiretap chewing out Magaddino for the fiasco.
“I hope you’re satisfied,” he said. “Sixty-three of our top
guys made by the cops.”
Magaddino replied, “I gotta admit you were right, Sam. It
never would have happened in your place.”
Indeed, the carefully planned event was now going terribly
wrong. One of the enduring questions about the Apalachin
incident is why these men, veterans of bloody mob wars
and of numerous encounters with the law, panicked. They
were committing no crime; the police never closed in.
Maybe the unfamiliar wide-open spaces threw them off.
Maybe the dynamics of the crowd took over. Whatever the
reason, they ran.
Croswell knew now that he had uncovered something big.
As additional troopers arrived, he sent them to track down
the men who had scurried into the woods. Other officers
helped ferry the carloads of gangsters to the station. After
the first flurry the participants of the thwarted meeting tried
to exit a few at a time. Each car was detained as it left.
In one was Joe Profaci, the “Olive Oil King” and top man in
one of the five New York families. Another held Carlo
Gambino, whom Genovese had installed as head of
Anastasia’s faction, a reward to Gambino for betraying his
boss.
Croswell’s men picked up some of the nation’s most
notorious hoodlums in humbling circumstances. The long-
time Brooklyn mob boss Joe Bonanno was nabbed in a
cornfield. He would later claim that it wasn’t him at all but
someone who happened to have his driver’s license. The
Tampa kingpin Santo Traffkante, Jr., was more at home in
the nightclubs of Havana, where he played a key role in
the mob’s gambling empire, than in the dank woods of
upstate New York. He emerged from the woods with a
couple of confederates only to see a State Police car
approaching. The group turned tail; the troopers fired
several warning shots; the gangsters gave up.
Police took all the detainees to the substation in nearby
Vestal. “We gave them a rough time at the station house,”
Croswell said. “But we couldn’t even make them commit
disorderly conduct there.” The gangsters had to empty
their pockets and take off their shoes. Police found no
guns or contraband on any of the participants. The men
did carry a great deal of cash, a total of around three
hundred thousand dollars (one man, who had a roll worth
close to ten thousand, listed his occupation as
“unemployed”).
The final tally wasn’t complete until one o’clock the next
morning, an hour after the last of those who had run for
the woods was brought in from the rain. “One by one we
rounded them up,” Croswell said, “bedraggled, soaking
wet, and tired.” He added, “There are no sidewalks in the
woods.”
Sixty-five gangsters were taken at the roadblock or in the
surrounding area, and speculation placed as many as forty
more men on the attendance list. Barbara’s house was
never searched; any who did not flee could have waited
out the raid inside. About the reaction of those nabbed,
Croswell noted, “These guys are never indignant.” All of
them answered questions politely and left the station
quietly.
By the time Croswell processed the last of the men, he was
being swamped by calls from reporters. The following day
headlines blossomed in newspapers throughout the
country. Here at last was proof of what Kefauver had
warned about. Here was the “Grand Council” of the Mafia,
the nerve center of crime in America. The enemy had
finally been flushed into the open.
The police were immediately excoriated for releasing the
biggest catch of mobsters in history. Croswell’s critics
ignored the fact that the men, none of whom was a wanted
fugitive, were peacefully assembled on private property.
The police action was itself of questionable legality, since
there was no legitimate cause for suspicion.
Almost all the men stated that they had dropped by to pay
a sick call on Barbara, that their simultaneous arrival on a
Thursday morning had been sheer coincidence. John C.
Montana, a taxi-company owner and former city council-
man from Buffalo, was one of the few to give a more
complete explanation. He later testified that he had been
on his way to Pittstown, Pennsylvania, when his car’s
brakes had failed in Ithaca. He thought Barbara or
someone at his house could help fix them. While drinking
tea in Barbara’s home, he had noticed “some kind of party”
going on but didn’t inquire about it. At the shout of
“Roadblock!” he ran for the woods. He explained, ”…it was
just human nature that I would say to myself: what am I
doing here?”
Others were more accustomed to police roundups. Only 9
of those captured had no record. The remainder boasted
more than 275 arrests among them, 100 convictions. Their
sheets contained busts for gambling, narcotics, weapons
violations, bootlegging, and union rackets.
The list of attendees gave a snapshot of the underworld of
the time. The mob was aging. Al Capone had reached the
pinnacle of power while still in his twenties. The men at
Apalachin were survivors, wily veterans of Prohibition,
many of them in their fifties and sixties.
The meeting was emblematic of the ascendancy of the
Italian gangs in postwar organized crime. About half of the
guests were natives of southern Italy or Sicily; the rest had
been born in America of Italian heritage. Apalachin also
illustrated the degree to which kinship formed a glue that
held the underworld together—twenty-five of those picked
up were related to one or more of the other guests—and
provided a clue to the movement of the mob into legitimate
business. The garment trade was the most common
occupation detainees gave to police. State investigators
reported that Natale Evola, a Brooklyn cousin of Joe
Barbara’s wife, “is believed to exercise control over the
shoulder pad industry.” He was later indicted as a major
narcotics dealer. Eleven men listed their occupation as
olive oil and cheese importation; others operated bars and
restaurants, beer distributorships, and funeral homes.
While Apalachin was the most famous mob convention
ever held, it was far from the first. What made Apalachin
different from the earlier gatherings was its wholesale
discovery. “Secrecy,” Elias Canetti declares, “lies at the
very core of power.” Apalachin set in motion events that
would gradually strip the underworld of much of its
secrecy. That was what made the event a turning point
and in many senses a high-water mark for the mob.
“Apalachin was of enormous importance,” says the veteran
mob watcher Nicholas Pileggi, author of Wiseguys: Life in a
Mafia Family. “It proved that this wasn’t the fantasy that
many had thought. It made it harder for the lawyers and
apologists to deny the existence of organized crime. After
Apalachin the mob’s political support began to crack.
Gangsters are still active today in hijacking, loan-sharking,
and other activities; the difference is that they’ve lost the
official clout. They no longer appoint judges or state
senators.”
The power of the gang bosses rested on rispetto, the
mixture of respect and fear that the old Mafia dons had
employed to further their extortions. Ridicule was a peril.
The opera buffa of Apalachin made Vito Genovese a
laughingstock in the underworld. His fortunes never
recovered. Seventeen months after the meeting, the
government hit him with a fifteen-year sentence for
conspiracy to distribute narcotics. He died in jail ten years
later.
In 1957 organized crime was suddenly news. Each of the
Apalachin participants became the focus of publicity and
potential official action on his home turf. Attendance at the
meeting was taken as proof of involvement in a malignant
conspiracy. The public demanded to know why this
“second government,” now no longer invisible, was allowed
to exist. The authorities began to die for answers.
The New York legislature assigned a watchdog committee
to look into the matter. Grand juries probed for
wrongdoing. Paul Castellano, the chauffeur, brother-in-law,
and eventual successor to Carlo Gambino, served seven
months for his silence before a New York City panel.
Liquor and immigration authorities began to examine
participants. Joe Barbara, plagued by health problems,
never testified about the meeting, but he lost his pistol
permit and his beer license and soon after sold both his
house and business. When he died in 1959, only four of
the hordes of “well-wishers” from two years earlier made it
to his funeral.
On the federal level Apalachin came under the magnifying
glass of a Senate committee chaired by John McClellan of
Arkansas. The Senate Rackets Committee, as it was
known, had been digging up dirt on mob infiltration of labor
unions for nine months before Apalachin. Twenty-two of
the delegates to Apalachin had union or labor-
management ties. The hearings were driven by the group’s
chief counsel, Robert Kennedy. Genovese appeared
before the panel wearing amber-shaded glasses and took
the Fifth Amendment more than 150 times. McClellan’s
investigation proved to be an important step toward
cleaning up mob-dominated unions.
J. Edgar Hoover understood that Apalachin made a
mockery of his long-held position that no Mafia existed in
America. A few days in the wake of Apalachin, Hoover set
up a “Top Hoodlum Program,” using the bureau to
consolidate information on leading gangsters.
Various explanations have been put forth as to why Hoover
demonstrated such a blind spot when it came to gangland
realities, including a theory that the mob was blackmailing
him. It’s more likely that Hoover’s reasoning was closer to
what he so often stated: a notion that crime was a local
problem. He told the Kefauver committee that if state and
local laws were properly enforced, gambling would be
eliminated “within forty-eight hours.” Having kept his
agency clear of the debacle of Prohibition, Hoover had
long preached against turning the FBI into a national
police force.
Hoover’s instincts as a bureaucrat told him that effective
action against organized crime meant cooperation with
other federal agencies, a prospect he loathed. It also
meant diverting resources from his obsessive hunt for
domestic Communists. Whatever the reason, even after
Apalachin, Hoover continued to drag his feet on organized
crime. He squashed a Bureau report that detailed the
history of the underworld because it admitted the existence
of a syndicate. In 1959 the Bureau’s New York office still
had four hundred agents assigned to domestic security
details and only four looking into the mob.
Robert Kennedy lambasted the Eisenhower administration
that same year for its failure to prosecute gang bosses.
“The proof is the Apalachin convention,” he said. “Sixty top
gangsters were there, but no local, state, or federal officer
knew about it. It was discovered only by chance.…”
Hoover’s views began to shift even before Kennedy took
over the Justice Department, and by 1961 he had plunged
into the war on gangsterism with the zeal of a convert.
Convinced by Apalachin, Robert Kennedy remained an
intrepid foe of the mob during his tenure as Attorney
General. Insisting that the government needed to attack
organized crime “with weapons and techniques as effective
as their own,” he pushed five anti-mob bills through
Congress in 1961 and more than tripled the size of the
department’s organized-crime section. Kennedy’s
approach was all action. “Don’t define it,” he said, “do
something about it.” By 1963 the government had indicted
more than six hundred organized-crime figures.
That same year a portly man of fifty-eight with an iron gray
crew cut, a gangster for thirty-six years, went before
McClellan’s committee and became the first insider to sing
publicly about the mob. This was Joe Valachi, a soldier in
Genovese’s gang who believed that his boss had betrayed
him. Valachi became the Boswell of the Mafia, confirming
much of what was already suspected, putting together the
bricks of the story with the mortar of terminology and
anecdote.
One of the secrets that Valachi confirmed was that
mobsters never used the term Mafia. Instead they talked
vaguely of cosa nostra, “our thing.” FBI agents liked this.
They turned the reference into a proper name, La Cosa
Nostra, transformed it into an acronym, LCN, and thereby
saved face for their director. There was, as Hoover had
always claimed, no Mafia.
Apalachin also passed into the national vocabulary as a
synonym for the underworld. Newspaper columnists
referred to mobsters as “the Apalachin boys.” Every
subsequent gathering of gangsters was inevitably labeled
a “little Apalachin.”
Apalachin won Sergeant Croswell high praise for his
diligence and established him as an organized-crime
expert. He toured the nation talking about the underworld.
After retiring from the State Police as a captain in 1966, he
helped investigate corruption in the New York carting
industry, and during the 1970s he served as head of the
state’s Organized Crime Task Force.
The names of Apalachin’s attendees—Genovese,
Gambino, Profaci, and Bonanno—became touchstones of
organized crime. Carlo Gambino rose to become gangland’
s big cheese. His successor, Paul Castellano, who also
enjoyed a steak sandwich at Barbara’s home that day, was
among a bevy of mob leaders who in 1985 were indicted
under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations
Act. Their crime was membership in the Mafia Commission
itself, the once-secret Grand Council, whose membership
changes were now reported routinely in The New York
Times. When the conspirators were duly convicted and
sentenced to hundred-year terms, Castellano wasn’t
around to join them; he had been shot down in front of his
favorite New York steakhouse, a victim of his ambitious
successor, John Gotti.
By the mid-1990s Vito Genovese’s outfit, which could
boast Lucky Luciano among its succession of leaders, had
passed into the hands of a man who prosecutors alleged
had become the dean of mobsters. Convicted in 1997 for
racketeering and conspiracy to murder, he was none other
than Vincent (“The Chin”) Gigante, the onetime boxer
whose 1957 attempt to plug Frank Costello was a major
item on the Apalachin agenda.
In spite of the many revelations since Apalachin, the exact
nature of the underworld remains elusive. Like the blind
men with their elephant, observers perceive an organized
crime of their own construction. Government officials find a
second government. Law enforcement people see a
paramilitary structure not unlike their own. Experts draw up
organization charts with rigid chains of command.
Reformers find corrupt politicians, nativists ethnic
conspirators, moralists sinners.
None of the models exactly fits what Meyer Lansky’s
biographer Robert Lacey calls “the confused, fluid, and
essentially entrepreneurial character of most criminal
activity.” In a sense Apalachin left a false impression of a
distinct and easily definable mob ruled from the top. It fixed
in the public mind the image of shady men meeting to
direct a vast conspiracy. If that picture had been accurate,
perhaps we would not still be wrestling with a stubborn
organized-crime problem more than forty years after the
event. In reality the underworld, with its matrix of personal
influence, blood loyalties, intimidation, ad hoc enterprise,
and political connections, defies both categorical
description and easy remedy.
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