Eric Ferrara - Manhattan Mafia Guide: Hits, Homes & Headquarters

Mulberry Street, 1900. Detroit Publishing Company, Library of Congress.

Mulberry Street today. Courtesy of Shirley Dluginski.

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC 29403

www.historypress.net

Copyright 2011 by Eric Ferrara

All rights reserved

First published 2011

e-book edition 2012

ISBN 978.1.61423.351.0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ferrara, Eric.

Manhattan Mafia guide : hits, homes and headquarters / Eric Ferrara.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

print edition ISBN 978-1-60949-306-6

1. Mafia--New York (State)--New York--History. 2. Criminals--New York (State)--New York--Biography. 3. Crime scenes--New York (State)--New York--Guidebooks. 4. Hiding places--New York (State)--New York--Guidebooks. 5. New York State (N.Y.)--Guidebooks. I. Title.

HV6452.N72M3445 2011

364.106097471--dc23

2011021478

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

CONTENTS

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FOREWORD

USA OR BUST

That life is all gone now, Im frequently reminded by motion-picture actor Butch the Hat Aquilino, recalling the rough-and-tumble schemes of mobs and men who once monopolized the five boroughs. Theres nothing left.

A native of Mott Street, Butch the Hat has been a fixture of New York Citys Little Italy district long enough to remember Don Vito Genovese strolling its concrete sidewalks like a bloodthirsty pope, and even long enough to have run the occasional errand for an elderly Samuel Levinenicknamed Red on account of henna-colored hair and a big round face full of freckleswho in decades past was an iron-fisted enforcer for the Brooklyn Combination and who, or so its been committed to Judaica, refused to commit an act of homicide during Shabbat, even if you paid him.

As though it happened over breakfast, Butch the Hat remembers an inauspicious morning during the late 1950s when Red Levine strolled into Ratners famous delicatessen on Delancey Streeta spot where he and his most senior crime associates had been dining for nearly half a centuryand went completely unrecognized by the fresh-faced new employees who greeted him. Made to wait for service like a schnorrer, Levine felt slighted, and fueled by equal parts fury and frustration, he acted out. Gripping the closest serving tray, in one nimble movement he riddled the pastrami-scented airspace with three dozen freshly baked pastries, and until the day he died, he swore hed never return. Already, it was a new day dawning, and Red Levine, like the assorted mutts with whom he once ran these same streets, wasnt going gently into night.

Butch the Hat is a world-class reminiscer. When little more than a teenager, he witnessed an underworld slaying that later figured prominently in Martin Scorseses classic film Mean Streets. Today, the place where it happened is reimagined as a Chinese market, but the mens room where gunshots rang out is still there, calling Butch back to events that few but he can remember. In Hollywoods version, the bloody-shirted victim was portrayed by actor David Carradine, but Butch the Hat knew the true-life versions of both victim and killerone a degenerate alcoholic and the other a deranged Mafia aspirant who was himself later eliminated, his body deposited in the trunk of a stolen car. Before that car trunk, though, home was an apartment across the hall from Butch the Hat. To say the shooter knew where to locate a potential eyewitness would be a gross understatement. Butch lived and breathed just one cup of sugar from catastrophe.

The incident rattled him; day and night, Butch the Hat worried hed be hauled in by police detectives spotted swarming the crime scene and then nailed on a charge of guilt by association. Too often for his comfort, those cases had a clever way of sticking, and Butch the Hat began to sweat. He knew the killers identity, and that was much more, very possibly, than hed care to admit to police. Weighing it out, he sought the counsel of an elder statesman of the neighborhood, finding him in his usual spot on Mulberry Street, near the entrance of a social club known as the Alto Knights. There, Butch told his story while his uncle, Peter DeFeo, the Genovese crime familys official armorer, listened in silence.

Did you do it? DeFeo asked casually as his nephew concluded his monologue. The older man scanned the opposite sidewalk for familiar faces, occasionally nodding or waving. Butch admitted he hadnt.

No? You didnt? Then let the ones who did it worry.

And that, as it were, was that. With a few carefully selected syllables, the case was closed, and Butch the Hat hardly spared it another thought. If the cops hauled him in for questioning, he had nothing to hide. So why be in hiding?

Afterward, Butch the Hat came to recognize the value of his uncles advice, soliciting it more often, and while doing so, he couldnt help but be awed by the degree of reverence with which full-grown men would approach DeFeoit rivaled the veneration of Saint Gennaro in the annual street festa, which DeFeo was rumored to control. But even then, in his youth, Butch knew the stories that had coined his uncles reputationhow DeFeo went into hiding when a woman coveted by Vito Genovese was widowed, her husband strangled on a Greenwich Village rooftop; and how he fled once again, this time to a resort hotel in the Catskills, when an associate nicknamed the Shadow was shot dead on the floor of a Brooklyn pool hall. Thirty years later, Butch read in the New York Times that the hoodlum who had accused his uncle of the crime was towed from Jamaica Bay, his hands bound together and a block of concrete hardened around each leg. Butch knew all about the dice games, the shylocking and how DeFeo would use his brother-in-laws name, or even wear his clothes, to throw off investigators. And there were other stories, tooeven less flattering onesbut this was Peter DeFeos world, and the fact that he had stayed in it so long translated to mean one thing: he knew what it took to survive.

A couple of years before Joey Gallo was gunned down on Mulberry Street, however, something happenedsomething never fully explained to Butch the Hat. His uncle may have sensed a sea change coming, something in the air that made him uneasy about the future, because he abruptly whisked his family away from the neighborhood, sequestering them all in a luxury hi-rise along Park Avenue. And there they stayed, in some sense never to return.

Instead of following them to the Upper East Side, though, DeFeo stayed put, satisfied to carry on his daily routine until, predictably enough, he was nudged to the sidelines by ambitious underlings and permitted to retire into relative seclusion. But even then, Pete DeFeo kept the law guessing: for several years after his passing, rackets detectives of the New York City Police Department were still openly speculating about his criminal activities.