A Death in the
Family
The Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) was formed in 1929 to combat the
growing drug problem in America. Sixty-one years earlier, the first recorded
instance of drug smuggling occurred, involving a Chinese merchant, Wah Kee who
was arrested for smuggling opium into the Chinatown area of Lower Manhattan.
The FBN were streetwise cops. They pioneered many of the techniques used
successfully in later years by the DEA that replaced them, such as the use of
paid informants and undercover operatives, procedure also adopted in due course
by the FBI and other Organized Crime Strike Forces.
They soon discovered that the Italian-American crime groups had taken control
of the burgeoning narcotics trade. One of the names that kept appearing
frequently on their reports was that of Gaetano Lucchese. They came close to
nailing him on a number of occasions, once at a restaurant in New Jersey where
he met up with known drug traffickers, and again when he liased with Corsican
and Sicilian drug wholesalers. Each time he successfully avoided compromising
himself and avoided arrest.
They identified Lucchese as head of the 107th Street Mob, which was how
they recognised the Gagliano family, but their intelligence wrongly identified
Dominic Petrelli and Mike Coppola as two of his lieutenants, when they were
actually members of the Frank Costello’s unit, which later became known as the
Genovese family.
Although respected leaders of the underworld such as Luciano and Costello
tried their best to steer the Mob away from its involvement with drugs, the
simple fact was that Lucchese, along with Vito Genovese and Joe Bonanno, two
other major figures in the New York underworld, found narcotics (mainly heroin)
irresistible as a vehicle to generate immense amounts of profit.
A trusted capo in Lucchese’s family, Giovanni (Big John) Ormento
supervised a huge $300 million-a-year business for the group. Strutting his
stuff in East Harlem, a big, hulking, beetle-browed lump of a man with a booming
voice, he openly referred to himself as a dope dealer, adorning himself with
diamond encrusted watches, belt buckles and rings. He managed his business
secure in the knowledge that even if caught, his prison sentence would be
relatively light. Past experience had shown him that this was the case. In 1937
he was sent to Leavenworth for three years, in 1941 for eight, and in 1952 for
two.
A personal friend of Anastasia, Luciano, Costello and Adonis, in 1956 he was
awarded one of the highest accolades. He was best man at the wedding in Detroit
at the wedding of Anthony Tocca a power in the mid-west Mafia, and the daughter
of New York don, Joseph Profaci.
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Giovanni Ormento Credit: UPI
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He and his men turned Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem into an open air flea
market in drugs, where dealers and pushers could meet each day to organize the
business of buying and selling heroin. In the early 1950’s a kilo of pure
heroin could be bought through Corsican drug smugglers for $30,000. When cut and
diluted down into small street packs for resale to addicts, it could return as
much as $500,000 in profit.
The FBN however, were able to recruit a man from the Gagliano family who
could have done them untold damage. His name was Eugene Giannini. Born in Bari,
in Calabria, Italy in 1910, he had immigrated to America as a boy and grew up in
Greenwich Village. He was a stocky, lecherous, ugly little man with a perpetual
sneer.
He had been in prison in 1928 for armed robbery and in 1934 shot and killed a
police officer during a hold up, but somehow escaped prosecution. In 1942, he
had been arrested on a heroin conspiracy charge and had served fifteen months in
prison. Shortly after this, he became an informer for the FBN, and from then on
operated in a kind of twilight zone, supplying them with information but at the
same time carrying on with his underworld activities. He only ever passed on
information to the FBN regarding individuals, but never compromised the family
as such. In this way he managed to operate on two levels without his identity
becoming known to his partners in crime.
In 1950, Giannini travelled to Europe, intending to smuggle into Italy high
demand and scarce supplies like penicillin, and purchase and arrange to smuggle
back into America heroin with the proceeds.
While in Italy, he was arrested and charged with dealing in counterfeit
currency. Locked away in a miserable prison called Poggio Reale in Naples, in
desperation he wrote to Charles Siragusa, the FBN’s European chief seeking
help. His letter contained highly sensitive information about Charlie Luciano,
then exiled in Italy and living in Naples. Eventually, through Siragusa’s
intervention, Giannini was released and returned to America.
Somehow, Luciano learned of Giannini’s letter and duplicity, and passed the
word back to the New York underworld. Under normal circumstances, Gagliano and
Lucchese would have handled the matter. However, Vito Genovese, busy trying to
assert himself and assume control of the crime family under Frank Costello, was
anxious to resolve the problem. The fact that the injured party was his old
boss, Charlie Luciano, was all the excuse he needed.
Working through Tony Bender, his right hand man, a “contract” was placed
on Giannini, and the man chosen for the job was Joseph Valachi, a soldier in
Bender’s crew. Eleven years later Valachi would become the first major Mob
informer to disclose the existence of the inner workings of the American Mafia,
or as he called it --- Cosa Nostra.
The hit on Giannini was a classic example of how the Mob hierarchy insulates
itself from the actual commission of a crime. The origin of the murder came from
Luciano in Italy. Lucchese was officially the instigator but surrendered control
to Genovese, who actually ordered it, but would be nowhere near the scene of the
crime; neither would Tony Bender who transmitted the command downwards. Even
Valachi, who was responsible for the actual murder, would not be playing a
physical part in its implementation. He in turn, for the actual execution,
selected three hoodlum associates who were anxious “to make their bones” by
killing on command, and therefore be eligible for membership into the Costello
crime family. One of these young men, Fiore (Fury) Siano was his nephew, the son
of one of his sisters.
After days of manoeuvring, it was decided to take Giannini out at a dice game
he was visiting at a place in East Harlem. The guns to be used in the killing
were collected from Tony Bender at one of his nightclubs in Greenwich Village.
Then complications set in. The dice game was being operated by Paul (Paulie
Ham) Correale, a member of the Gagliano family. Sensitive to the territorial
imperatives surrounding actions of violence involving different crime families
on the same turf, Valachi insisted on clearing the contract through his
immediate superior, Bender, who in turn checked with Lucchese, and received the
all clear, to proceed.
Sometime in the early hours of the morning of September 21st, 1952, the dead
body of Eugenio Giannini, aged forty-two, was found in a gutter outside a
delicatessen at 221 East 107th Street, Harlem. He was wearing a light tan sports
jacket, brown slacks and was wearing an expensive wristwatch on his left wrist.
He had $140 in his pocket and two .38 calibre bullets in his brain.
Because the body was found in this area, the FBN assumed there was some
symbolic warning in its location, as the victim was a known member of the 107th
Street Mob, as the Gagliano family was known. In fact, the reason was much more
simple. Some of the men at the dice game had found his body, slumped on the
sidewalk outside the Jefferson Major Athletic Club on 2nd Avenue, but he was
still alive. They were in fact rushing him to hospital, and when they discovered
that he had expired enroute, so to speak, they simply opened the car door and
dumped his body, without regard as to where they had stopped.
