Birth of a Family
From 1931 until his death from natural causes in 1953, Gaetano “Tom”
Gagliano ran the borgata or crime family that he had inherited from Reina.
By his side was Lucchese, his underboss and trusted friend.
There is maddeningly little historical information on Gagliano. He was tall
and had receding hair. He had interests in the construction industry and his
power base was in the Bronx and Harlem. He ran one of the largest Cosa Nostra
families in America, but maintained such a low profile; he was virtually unknown
outside the criminal underworld.
On April 3rd, 1928, he and Antonio Monforte organized the Plasters’
Information Bureau in the Bronx. Contractors were force to join the association
and pay it fees.
Those reluctant to do so were “encouraged” to join by hoods sent around
to their sites.
The two men also set up another corporation at about the same time called The
United Lathing Company. They used Michael McCloskey, known as the czar of
the Lathers Union to help them gain control of that industry. On demand of a 5%
fee, McCloskey ensured there would be no labour unrest. IRS investigators
estimated that Gagliano and his partner extorted $457,886.34 in 1929 through
just four of the “pseudo” companies that he had set up.
Eventually, through the IRS investigation, Gagliano was convicted for income
tax violation and sentenced to fifteen months in prison.
He died years before law enforcement agencies had clued in to the presence of
organized crime, and long before ‘phone taps and electronic “bugs” became
a major source of information on the working of the Mob. At the time of Gagliano’s
death, Joseph Valachi, the first Cosa Nostra member to reveal the inner
workings of organized crime, at least from the perspective of a lowly soldier,
was ten years away. The super “rats” such as Lombardo, Gravano, Fratiano and
D’Arco were twenty five or thirty years down the trail.
Joseph Valachi, the Genovese family soldier who “turned” and disclosed so
much information about the Mob in 1963 that he became the locus classicus
of the Mafia, had contact with Gagliano back in the days leading up to and
during the War. He was also a good friend of Tommy Lucchese and so obviously was
intimate with both of these men. Yet even he discloses only tantalising crumbs
of knowledge and information.
Valachi was on one occasion summoned to a meeting with Gagliano, sometime in
1929. He described his meeting-“Bobby tells me to go an see Tom Gagliano. I
knew he is a big shot, but just what or how I don’t know. He looked like a
businessman.”
Along with Lucchese, Gagliano attended the wedding of Valachi on September
18th, 1932, to Mildred the daughter of the late boss Tom Reina.
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Joseph Valachi
Credit: UPI
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At the peak of the Castellammarese War there were as many as 600 men in
Maranzano’s forces, and as between nations, warfare among rival underworld
organizations was costly. Gagliano put up $140,000 to purchase cars and guns,
and as payment for apartments used by his men as they moved around the city
fighting their skirmishes.
One of Gagliano’s major sources of revenue during this period was the
income from his numbers business in Harlem. Run by two of his top men, Stephano
and Vito LaSalle, it generated a lot of the war chest used to consummate
Maranzano’s victory over Masseria.
For years the numbers or policy game was and still is, a major favourite form
of gambling for lower-income groups. Its name“numbers” derives from the
penny insurance that was peddled in the late 1920’s and early 30’s; playing
the numbers was just like taking out a cheap policy. All the bettor had to do
was pick three numbers from 000 to 999 which made up the winning combination on
the given day. The odds against this of course are 999 to 1, but the payoff was
never more than 600 to 1. The balance was known as the “Bank”, in other
words the gross margin for the organizer.
The winning combination was determined in different ways, according to where
the game was played. In Harlem it was based on racetrack betting. The win, place
and show figures for the first three races at a given track were added, and the
first figure to the left of the decimal point became the first number. The
second number came the same way from races four and five, and the third from
races six and seven. The system varied in Brooklyn, but again was based on
racetrack betting totals.
Although bettors could drop as little as a nickel on a wager, most would
pledge a quarter and up. Even so, the money generated was huge. Dutch Schultz,
the Jewish gangster, ran a syndicate in Harlem that at its peak during these
times, was generating over $20,000,000 a year. This was in a period when the
average weekly wage was $10.
Gagliano was a founding member of the Commission, which met for the
first time in 1931, along with the leaders of the other four crime families in
New York, Stefano Magaddino of Buffalo, and whoever was running Chicago after Al
Capone went off to prison on income tax evasion charges -- either Frank Nitti,
Tony Accardo or Paul Ricca.
When Gagliano died in 1953, Tommy Lucchese inherited the family. His name had
been cropping up all over the place. He was 54 years old and at the peak of his
power, both as a criminal and as an arch manipulator of the convoluted political
system that drove the powerhouse of the New York political engine. If Frank
Costello was the “Prime Minister” of the underworld, then Lucchese was
undoubtedly its “Director General.”
In 1988, a United States Senate Committee investigating organized crime
considered a report from the Pennsylvania Crime Commission. In that report it
stated,“ That which distinguishes the Italian-American Syndicates from other
criminal groups is the insidious manner in which they have obtained monopoly
control over legitimate, as well as illegitimate markets. Despite changes in
personnel, the Italian-American Crime Syndicates have successfully employed
violence and intimidation so as to assure compliance between other criminal
groups, businessmen, labor leaders and politicians in order to control
competition within a specified market. In what has historically been termed “racketeering,”
the Italian-American Crime Syndicates participate in criminal conspiracies with
the aforementioned entities in order to derive the financial benefits of a
monopoly.”
Nobody did it better than Thomas Lucchese.
