Latest news with #FiveFamilies:TheRise
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
CRIME HUNTER: New Mafia movie Alto Knights focuses on Costello-Genovese war
'This is for you, Frank,' the young hitman snarled before firing at mob boss Frank Costello outside New York's Waldorf-Astoria. The bullet only grazed Costello – known as the Prime Minister of the Underworld for his diplomatic skills – but it was enough to send him into retirement, leaving the reins of the Luciano Crime Family to arch-rival Vito Genovese. The rivalry between the two gangsters is the premise of a new mob movie, Alto Knights, starring Robert DeNiro playing both arch-criminals. In addition to DeNiro, the crime drama also stars Debra Messing, Cosmo Jarvis, Kathrine Narducci, and Michael Rispoli. The film – directed by Barry Levinson and was written by Nick Pileggi, who also penned GoodFellas – was out Friday. *** The year 1957 was a blockbuster year in the American underworld. Costello was hit in May by up-and-coming gangster Vincent 'The Chin' Gigante, later called The Oddfather by the New York tabloids. Costello never pointed the finger at 'The Chin' and decades later the former boxer would become boss of the Genovese family. Once Costello was out of the way, the greedy, violent and ambitious Genovese was looking to tie up loose ends. One of those loose ends was Albert Anastasia. Known as the Mad Hatter and Lord High Executioner for his volatile demeanour, the 55-year-old ran what would become the Gambino crime family. 'A glare from Genovese's dark eyes from beneath bushy eyebrows intimidated the bravest mafioso,' mob expert Selwyn Raab wrote in Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires. Costello found himself in the Genovese's crosshairs. The bloodthirsty rebel wanted to be capo di tutti capi – boss of bosses. That meant taking over the commission, the board of directors of the national crime syndicate. Genovese and Carlo Gambino decided to take out Murder Inc. founder Anastasia. On Oct. 25, 1957, while getting a shave in the barber shop of New York's posh Park-Sheraton Hotel, two gunmen entered and shot Anastasia to death as he rested in the barber's chair. Everything was going Genovese's way. Three weeks later, on Nov. 14, 1957, Genovese ordered a summit of the nation's mafia leaders for what he hoped would be his coronation. The meet would be held at the rural home of mobster Joseph 'Joe the Barber' Barbara in Apalachin, New York, west of Binghampton. On the agenda were drugs, loansharking, Cuba and divvying up the spoils of Albert Anastasia's empire. Around 100 mobsters from the U.S., Canada and Italy were in attendance. Then it all came off the rails when a local state trooper noticed all the limos with out-of-state licence plates. Cops moved in and more than 60 gangland czars were pinched. Some were jailed, and some were hit with hefty fines, but the true damage was that Cosa Nostra was no longer in the shadows. The debacle was the beginning of the end for Genovese. *** Vito Genovese's throbbing resentment toward Costello went back nearly three decades, according to author Tony DeStefano, who wrote the 2018 book Top Hoodlum: Frank Costello Prime Minister of The Mafia, followed in 2021 by The Deadly Don: Vito Genovese, Mafia Boss. Both criminals had been under the command of Mafia visionary Lucky Luciano during the days of prohibition. 'I think the main problem was that Genovese felt envious of Costello, who was the more polished, politically connected and more astute businessman,' the author said. 'For those reasons, Costello was given the leadership of the family by Luciano after Genovese left for Europe in the face of the murder rap.' And that grated on the petty Genovese. 'Upon his return to New York City in 1945, [Genovese] realized he had missed out on many opportunities in the rackets and wanted Costello to compensate him a share, which didn't happen,' DeStefano told MobMuseum. He added: 'Genovese saw Costello in the 1950s as the main impediment to his control of the family. So Genovese got Gigante to try and kill Costello in the failed assassination attempt.' *** Genovese's ride at the top didn't last long. In 1959, the cold-blooded killer was convicted on narcotics conspiracy charges for peddling heroin. There has long been a belief among cops and gangsters alike that Genovese was set up by his old boss, Lucky Luciano. According to the narrative, Luciano – by then living in exile in Rome – had soured on Genovese for his machinations and belief he was bad for business. So the mobster paid $100,000 to a Puerto Rican dope dealer to falsely implicate his former protege. Genovese got 15 years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. There, he gave longtime trusted soldier Joe Valachi the infamous kiss of death. Valachi flipped and gave the feds a birds-eye view of the Cosa Nostra's inner workings and with the publication of the Valachi Papers, a pop culture star. Genovese died of a heart attack in 1969. HUNTER: Mob-like Morris Conte dismemberment murder a personal affair LAMEFELLAS: Mafia bosses moan about 'low' calibre aspiring wiseguys MOB WAR: Bloodbath feared in Mafia heartland after scion's murder *** Unlike Genovese, Costello remained respected elder statesman in the underworld. The Godfather character of Don Vito Corleone was long-reputed to be based on Costello. Four years after Genovese pegged out in a Missouri prison, death came for the Prime Minister of the Underworld. Costello died quietly of natural causes in 1973. He was 82. 'If ever there was an organized crime figure who came out pretty good, it was Frank Costello,' screenwriter Nick Pileggi said. bhunter@ @HunterTOSun
New York Times
04-03-2025
- New York Times
Selwyn Raab, Tenacious Reporter Who Covered the Mob, Dies at 90
Selwyn Raab, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and other news organizations who in exacting detail explored the Mafia's many tentacles, and whose doggedness helped lead to the exoneration of men wrongly convicted of notorious 1960s killings, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 90. His son-in-law, Matthew Goldstein, a Times reporter, said the cause of his death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was intestinal complications. Though the phrase surely fit him, Mr. Raab didn't much care to be described as an investigative journalist. Rather, he said, 'I believe in enterprise and patience.' He had both qualities in abundance across a long career, whether looking into fraudulent methadone clinics, or the life sentence given to a boy who was only 14 when convicted of murder, or the Mafia's grip on New York City school construction. He was also the author of a number of books about the mob, including one that became the basis of the 1970s television police drama 'Kojak.' The mob had his enduring attention as far back as the 1960s, and it led to his definitive 765-page book on New York wiseguys, 'Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires,' published in 2005. The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik described him in a 2020 article as 'the Gibbon of the New York mob.' His prose tended to stray from elegance. But Bryan Burrough, reviewing 'Five Families' for The New York Times Book Review, said that 'what makes Raab so wonderful is that he eschews legend and suspect anecdotage in favor of a Joe Friday-style just-the-facts-ma'am approach.' Mr. Raab posited that it was Charles (Lucky) Luciano who invented the modern Mafia nearly a century ago, organizing Italian criminal operations into distinct families, with a 'commission' created to resolve territorial disputes and policy matters. In addition to tried and true enterprises — drug trafficking, gambling, prostitution — Cosa Nostra control extended to much of municipal life, Mr. Raab wrote, be it garbage removal, the garment industry, unions, construction, or fish and meat markets. Despite a popular tendency to look upon gangsters as 'amiable rogues,' he said, they were murderous predators and 'the invisible government of New York.' As a boy on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he lived almost his entire life, Mr. Raab saw the mob up close. There, he told Time magazine in 1974, he was 'surrounded by the kind of legendary criminals you read about — bookmakers, con artists, Jewish and Italian gangsters.' 'I grew up with guys I later covered,' he said. A former Times colleague, Ralph Blumenthal, said that Mr. Raab tended to be humorless but was 'a demon for the facts.' He added, 'When you think of the causes he adopted, they were groundbreaking.' That was true even before Mr. Raab joined The Times, his digging having helped free men wrongly convicted of some of the New York region's more shocking murders. One was George Whitmore Jr., who had been imprisoned for the 1963 murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, roommates in an Upper East Side apartment — 'career girls,' as the tabloids called them. Mr. Raab, working first for the merged newspaper The New York World-Telegram and The Sun and then for NBC News and the New York public television station WNET-TV, uncovered evidence showing that Mr. Whitmore was elsewhere on the day of those murders and had no part in an unrelated attempted rape with which he was also charged. Mr. Whitmore said that the police had beaten him, and that he had no lawyer during the interrogation. In 1996, his case was cited by the United States Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona, the landmark ruling that upheld a suspect's right to counsel. Mr. Raab wrote a book about the case, 'Justice in the Back Room,' which became the basis for 'Kojak,' the CBS series about a police detective, played by Telly Savalas, which ran for five years in the 1970s. 'I'm not a detective,' Mr. Raab said. 'I just look for the most reasonable approach to a story.' He joined The Times in 1974 and worked there for 26 years. Reporting for the paper, he uncovered evidence that helped free Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the middleweight boxer who was imprisoned for 19 years in the 1966 shooting deaths of three people in a bar in Paterson, N.J. The Carter case was another instance of police coercion and prosecutorial overreach, one that also led to the conviction of another man, John Artis. Mr. Carter, who died in 2014, became something of a folk hero, his cause championed in a 1976 Bob Dylan song, 'Hurricane,' and in a 1999 film, 'The Hurricane,' in which Mr. Carter was played by Denzel Washington. Mr. Raab received many honors across the years, including the Heywood Broun Award from the New York Newspaper Guild and an Emmy for his work on 'The 51st State,' a WNET program that dealt with New York City issues and on which he was a reporter and an executive producer for three years before moving to The Times. Selwyn Norman Raab was born on June 26, 1934, in Manhattan, one of two sons of immigrant parents: William Raab, a New York bus driver born in Austria, and Berdie (Glantz) Raab, a homemaker born in Poland. As a boy, Mr. Raab boxed in a program run by the city's parks department. He graduated from Seward Park High School in Lower Manhattan in 1951 and from the City College of New York in 1956, with a bachelor's degree in English. After college, he worked for The Bridgeport Sunday Herald in Connecticut (now defunct) and The Newark Star-Ledger before joining the World-Telegram staff. On a blind date in 1962, he met a social worker named Helene Lurie. They were married on Dec. 25, 1963. Mrs. Raab, who helped her husband with his research, died in 2019. Mr. Raab is survived by his daughter, Marian, a freelance writer and editor, and two grandsons. At City College, he was an editor on Observation Post, a student newspaper. He was twice suspended from classes for brief periods because of what he wrote — first for strongly resisting student government and faculty attempts to kill the newspaper, later for criticizing college administrators who had fired several professors under attack in the McCarthy era. He recalled those days in 2009, when he received a Townsend Harris Medal, an award given by City College in memory of its founder. His suspensions taught him a couple of things, Mr. Raab said. One was 'Never seek safe harbors to avoid contentious but important issues.' The other: 'Never sacrifice integrity on fundamental principles, especially if there is a clear distinction between right and wrong on vital issues.'
