I Heard You Paint Houses Page 8

  And then we had our first baby girl, Mary Ann, born on Mary’s birthday. There’s no greater feeling than that. I made a vow to make as much money as I could for my family. Being Catholic we were going to have as many children as God provided to us. We had a nice christening for Mary Ann at the house. Dusty came to the house, which was a little unusual in 1948 in Philadelphia. The Phillies were the last major league team to get a black player.

  After loading trucks for a while, I finally got a good steady union job as a truck driver with Food Fair. I kept that job for ten years. I delivered hindquarters and chickens mostly. Dusty showed me how to make a little extra on the side. I’d set aside some chickens and replace them with ice so the weight of the crates remained the same. I’d drive by the Red Rooster bar, and Dusty would have the people lined up to buy their chickens. He’d sell whole, fresh-killed chickens for a buck apiece, and we’d split the money down the middle. If I had sixty extra chickens, that was $30 apiece.

  My daughter Peggy was born a little over a year later, and with the steady work at Food Fair, the extra job at Wagner’s, and the money from the chickens, things were looking prosperous around the Sheeran household. Mary’s mother helped out with the two babies.

  Then I switched over a couple of nights from Wagner’s Dance Hall to the Nixon Ballroom as a bouncer with Dusty. The black girls would hit on me to make their boyfriends jealous, and I’d have to settle everybody down. One day Dusty came up with an idea. He told me that the men were beginning to think I was afraid to fight them because I would only settle them down. So we worked out a deal where I would back down and keep backing down while Dusty made bets that I would kick a guy’s ass. When the bets were in Dusty would nod his head and I’d knock the guy out. I don’t know if you’ve ever knocked anybody out, but the best place to hit them is where the jaw meets the ear. If you catch them right they fall forward. They were always grabbing at my shirt on the way down and ripping it, so I had a deal with Nixon that I got a new white shirt every night as part of my pay. Anyway, Dusty and I would split the profit on the bets. Unfortunately, that didn’t last too long. Pretty soon there were no volunteers.

  We had our third daughter in 1955, Dolores. Mary and I went to church every Sunday, and the children had their own mass. Mary went to novenas when they had them and made all the sacraments. Mary was a terrific mother. She was a very quiet girl like my mother, but she showed our girls affection. That was hard for me to do, because I never got it as a kid. I learned how more with my grandchildren than with my own children. Mary did the raising of the girls. All my daughters never gave me a headache on their behavior. Not due to my care. Due to their mother’s attention and the way she raised them.

  I used to take my second daughter, Peggy, to Johnny Monk’s club with me. Mary Ann liked to stay at home with her mother and the new baby, Dolores. Johnny Monk was the ward leader. His joint had very good food. We’d go there for New Year’s Eve, even though Mary was no drinker. Mary liked to arrange picnics with the kids, and we’d take them to the Willow Grove Amusement Park. I wasn’t always running. When they were smaller I used to take them out. I was very close to Peggy, but she doesn’t talk to me any more, not since Jimmy disappeared.

  The whole thing changed when I started hanging around downtown. Some of the drivers at Food Fair were Italian, and I started going downtown with them to the bars and restaurants that certain people also hung out in. I got into another culture.

  I feel very bad about it now. I wasn’t an abusive father, but I started getting a little neglectful, and Mary was too good a woman, too easy on me. Then at some point, I just joined that other culture and I stopped coming home. But I brought cash over every single week. If I did good, Mary did good. I was a selfish bastard. I thought I was doing good by giving money, but I didn’t give the kids enough family time. I didn’t give my wife enough time. It was different in the sixties when I married my second wife, Irene, and I had my fourth daughter, Connie. By then I was with Hoffa and the Teamsters, and I had steady money coming in and I was older and home more. I wasn’t out maneuvering. I was already in position.

  Sometime in the fifties I remember seeing On the Waterfront in the movies with Mary and thinking that I’m at least as bad as that Marlon Brando character and that some day I’d like to get in union work. The Teamsters gave me good job security at Food Fair. They could only fire you if they caught you stealing. Let me put it another way, they could only fire you if they caught you stealing and they could prove it.”

  chapter eight

  Russell Bufalino

  In 1957 the mob came out of the closet. It came out unwillingly, but out it came. Before 1957 reasonable men could differ over whether an organized network of gangsters existed in America. For years FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had assured America that no such organization existed, and he deployed the FBI’s greatest resources to investigate suspected Communists. But as a result of the publicity foisted on the mob in 1957, even Hoover came on board. The organization was dubbed “La Cosa Nostra,” meaning “this thing of ours,” a term heard on government wiretaps.

  Ironically, the publicity-shy Russell Bufalino had something to do with the mob’s unwanted publicity in 1957. Russell Bufalino helped organize the famous meeting of godfathers from around the nation at the town of Apalachin, New York, in November 1957. The meeting had been called to settle down the potential problems that could have erupted in the wake of the October 1957 shooting of godfather Albert Anastasia in a barber’s chair with a hot towel over his face in New York’s Park-Sheraton Hotel.

  The Apalachin meeting did the mob much more harm than good. The police in Apalachin were suspicious of all the mob activity in the area and raided the house in which the meeting was being held. This was before the U.S. Supreme Court changed all the laws on search and seizure. Fifty-eight of the most powerful mobsters in America were seized and hauled in by the police. Another fifty or so got away running through the woods.

  Also in 1957 the public was getting a close look at organized crime on TV every day during the televised sessions of the McClellan Committee Hearings on Organized Crime of the United States Senate. Live for all America to see in black and white as no newspaper could convey it were tough mobsters wearing diamond pinkie rings conferring quietly with their mob lawyers, then shifting in their chairs to face the senators and their counsel, Bobby Kennedy, and in gruff voices taking the Fifth Amendment as to every single question. Most of these questions were loaded with accusations of murder, torture, and other major criminal activity. The litany became a part of the culture of the fifties: “Senator, on advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer that question on the grounds that it might tend to incriminate me.” And, of course, the public took that answer as an admission of guilt.

  No major decision of the Commission of La Cosa Nostra was made without Russell Bufalino’s approval. Yet the public knew nothing of him before Apalachin and the McClellan Committee hearings. Unlike the Al Capones or the Dapper Don–types who flaunt their status, the quiet Bufalino could have been mistaken for a typical Italian immigrant.

  Born Rosario Bufalino in 1903 in Sicily, in the years following Apalachin and the McClellan hearings the Justice Department almost succeeded in having Bufalino deported, along with his close friend and ally Carlos Marcello, crime boss of New Orleans. With his plane tickets already purchased and arrangements made to take some of his money with him, Bufalino succeeded in beating his deportation charges in court.

  Not wanting to take their chances in court with Carlos Marcello, the FBI literally picked Russell’s good friend Carlos up off the streets of New Orleans and put him on a plane to Guatemala. Carlos had a Guatemalan birth certificate, and according to the FBI he had no rights of an American citizen. Fuming and enraged, Marcello flew back and also beat his deportation charges in court.

  Despite the government pressure Bufalino continued to conduct his business and flourish. The Pennsylvania Organized Crime Commission’s 1980 report “A Decad
e of Organized Crime” revealed that by that time: “There are no more Magaddino…or Genovese crime families—the members in these families are now under the control of Russell Bufalino.”

  Bufalino was identified by the Pennsylvania Organized Crime Commission as a silent partner of the largest supplier of ammunition to the Untied States government, Medico Industries. Russell Bufalino had secret interests in Las Vegas casinos and not-so secret connections to the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, whom Fidel Castro toppled in 1959. With Batista’s blessings Bufalino had owned a racetrack and a major casino near Havana. Bufalino lost a great deal of money and property, including the racetrack and the casino, when Castro booted the mob off the island.

  Time magazine reported in June 1975, a week before the assassination of Sam “Momo” Giancana in Chicago and a month before the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa in Detroit, and during the time of the Church Committee Senate hearings on the CIA’s ties to organized crime, that Russell Bufalino’s help had been successfully recruited by the CIA in a mysterious CIA-gangland plot to kill Castro. Senator Frank Church’s committee concluded that Bufalino was part of a bizarre conspiracy to assassinate Castro with poison pills just before the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion was to take place.

  Bufalino had three acquittals for organized crime activity in the seventies. The last, a federal extortion case, came down a mere five days prior to Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance. The Buffalo Evening News reported on July 25, 1975: “‘It turned out the way I anticipated,’ said Bufalino, who has been linked to the CIA’s plotting of the Bay of Pigs invasion.” That same day the Rochester, New York, Democrat and Chronicle reported: “When asked if he will retire, Bufalino said, ‘I’d like to retire, but they won’t let me retire. I’ve got to pay my lawyers.’”

  Russell Bufalino’s organized crime territory included Pennsylvania outside of Philadelphia, upstate New York including Buffalo, and interests in Florida and Canada, parts of New York City, and parts of northern New Jersey. But his true power was in the respect he got from every mob family in the country. In addition, his wife, Carolina Sciandra, known as Carrie, was related to the Sciandra line of La Cosa Nostra. Although no Sciandra ever rose to godfather status, members of the family went back to the earliest days of the American Mafia.

  Perhaps Bufalino’s closest friend was Philadelphia crime boss Angelo Bruno. Law enforcement referred to Bufalino as “the quiet Don Rosario” Bruno was known as the “Docile Don” for his similar low-key approach to heading a major crime family. Like Bufalino’s family, the Bruno crime family was not permitted to deal in drugs. Because of his perceived old-fashioned ways Bruno was killed by greedy underlings in 1980. Bruno’s demise would lead to everlasting anarchy in his family. His successor, Philip “Chicken Man” Testa, was literally blown up a year after taking over. Testa’s successor, Nicodemus “Little Nicky” Scarfo, is now serving multiple life sentences for murder, having been betrayed by his own underboss and nephew. Little Nicky’s successor, John Stanfa, is serving five consecutive life sentences for murder. Frank Sheeran got a Christmas card every year from John Stanfa in his Leavenworth cell. John Stanfa’s successor, Ralph Natale, is the first boss to turn government informant and testify against his own men. Frank Sheeran calls Philadelphia “the city of rats.” On the other hand, Russell Bufalino lived a long life. He died of old age in a nursing home in 1994 at the age of ninety. He controlled his “family” until the day he died, and unlike Angelo Bruno’s Philadelphia family, not a sign of discord has been reported in the Bufalino family since his death.

  Frank Sheeran said that of all the alleged crime bosses he ever met, the mannerisms and style of the Marlon Brando portrayal in The Godfather most nearly resembled Russell Bufalino.

  In a report of its findings the McClellan Committee on Organized Crime of the United States Senate called Russell Bufalino “one of the most ruthless and powerful leaders of the Mafia in the United States.”

  Yet in the summer of 1999 I picked up a man, his wife, and his son along an interstate in upstate Pennsylvania. Their car had broken down, and they needed to get to a rest area. The man turned out to be the retired chief of police of the town where Russell Bufalino had lived and where his widow Carrie still lived. I identified myself as a former prosecutor and asked if the man could tell me anything about Russell Bufalino. The retired police chief smiled and told me that “whatever he did in other places he kept it out of our jurisdiction. He was old-school, very polite, a perfect gentleman. You wouldn’t know he had two dimes to rub together from looking at his house or the car he drove.”

  chapter nine

  Prosciutto Bread and Homemade Wine

  “The day I met Russell Bufalino changed my life. And later on, just being seen in his company by certain people turned out to save my life in a particular matter where my life was most definitely on the line. For better or for worse, meeting Russell Bufalino and being seen in his company put me deeper into the downtown culture than I ever would have gotten on my own. After the war, meeting Russell was the biggest thing that happened to me after my marriage and having my daughters.

  I was hauling meat for Food Fair in a refrigerator truck in the mid-fifties, maybe 1955. Syracuse was my destination when my engine started acting up in Endicott, New York. I pulled into a truck stop and I had the hood up when this short old Italian guy walked up to my truck and said, “Can I give you a hand, kiddo?” I said sure and he monkeyed around for a while, I think with the carburetor. He had his own tools. I spoke a little Italian to him while he was working. Whatever it was, he got my horse started for me. When the engine started purring, I climbed down and I shook his hand and thanked him. He had a lot of strength in his handshake. The way we shook hands—warmly—you could tell that we both hit it off with each other.

  Later on when we got to know each other he told me that the first time he saw me he liked the way I carried myself. I told him that there was something special about him, too, like maybe he owned the truck stop or something, or maybe he owned the whole road, but it was more than that. Russell had the confidence of a champ or a winner while still being humble and respectful. When you went to church for confession on Saturday you knew which priest’s line to get on. You wanted to go to the fairest one that didn’t give you a hard time; he was like that priest. At the time we shook hands that first time I ever laid eyes on him I had no idea who he was or that I would ever see him again. But change my life he did.

  Around that same time I had already started going downtown to the Bocce Club at Fifth and Washington with a bunch of Italian guys I worked with at Food Fair who lived in South Philly. It was a new crowd for me. From there we’d go over to the Friendly Lounge at Tenth and Washington, owned by a guy named John who went by the nickname of Skinny Razor. At first I didn’t know anything about John, but some of the guys from Food Fair pushed a little money on their routes for John. A waitress, say, at a diner would borrow $100 and pay back $12 a week for ten weeks. If she couldn’t afford the $12 one week she’d just pay $2, but she’d still owe the $12 for that week and it would get added on at the end. If it wasn’t paid on time the interest would keep piling up. The $2 part of the debt was called the “vig,” which is short for vigorish. It was the juice.

  My Italian Food Fair buddies made a few bucks that way, and one time when we were at the Friendly Lounge they introduced me to Skinny Razor, and I got started doing it on my route. It was easy money, no muscle, strictly providing a service for people who had no credit. This was before credit cards when the people had nowhere to go for a couple of bucks between paychecks. But technically, pushing money was all illegal since it was the alleged crime of loan sharking.

  Pushing money was a natural for me, because I was already pushing football lottery tickets in the White Tower hamburger joints on my route for an Irish muscle guy and ex-boxer named Joey McGreal, who was a Teamster organizer out of my Local 107. My Italian pals at Food Fair bought lottery tickets from me. I wasn’t backing the lottery. I couldn’t
afford to do that in case somebody hit big. McGreal was backing the thing, and I took my cut on commission. I played the lottery tickets myself. Soon I began selling them downtown to people in the bars. The real bookmakers like Skinny Razor didn’t care if I sold them right in the bar, because they didn’t mess with football lotteries. It was small stuff. Even so, they were illegal in those days; I guess they still are.

  You could tell Skinny Razor was successful with his side businesses of bookmaking and loan sharking from the way he conducted his business and the kind of respect he got from people who came in to talk to him. He looked like he was an officer or something and everybody else was an enlisted man. But none of my Italian friends identified him as any kind of a gangster big shot or anything like that. What kind of a big shot has the nickname of Skinny Razor?

  John got the name Skinny Razor because he used to own a live chicken store and the Italian ladies would come and pick out a chicken they wanted from looking at the chickens in the cages all lined up. Then John would take out a straight razor and cut the chicken’s throat, and that was the chicken the Italian ladies would take home and pluck and cook for dinner.

  Skinny Razor was very well liked and he had a great sense of humor. He called everybody “mother” in an affectionate way, not like they use that term today. He was very lean and went about 6'1", which was very tall for downtown. He looked a little like a skinny straight razor. Skinny was very good for the underdog. If you made a mistake you could always cop a plea with him, unless what you did was “severe.” If it was a misdemeanor he’d give you a break, but he wasn’t going to adopt you.

  As hard as it is to believe today, people didn’t really know that there was a mob organization in those days. We heard about individual gangsters, sure, like Al Capone with their own gang, but a national Mafia with a hand in just about everything—not too many people knew about that. I was in the know about a lot of things, but I didn’t know about that even a little bit. Like everybody else, I didn’t know that the neighborhood bookie was tied in with the cat-burglar jewel thief or the hijacker of trucks or the labor boss or the politician. I didn’t know there was this big thing I was getting exposed to little by little in the beginning, when I was getting exposed to their culture. In a way it was like a dock worker being exposed to asbestos every day and not knowing how dangerous it is. They didn’t want people to know.