Friends of Ours

Genovese Boss Gives Blessing From The Beyond To Lesbian Daughter's Upcoming Wedding

Rita Gigante, the daughter of deceased Genovese boss Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, recently came out as a lesbian in her memoir The Godfather's Daughter, and the spiritualist who speaks to the dead now is announcing that her upcoming nuptials to Bobbi Sterchele has been blessed from the hereafter by the passed mobster as reported by John Marzulli for the Daily News:

The legendary mafioso, who breathed his last in 2006, will be there [at the wedding] in spirit, says his daughter, Rita Gigante. And the dearly departed wiseguy -- dubbed "The Oddfather" for parading around Greenwich Village in a ratty-looking bathrobe -- will be dressed to impress.  "He's showing up in a suit and tie," Gigante told the Daily News.

Apparently the mobster's spirit isn't the only wise guy supportive of a gay child.

Last month Donna DeLucia wrote a letter to a Brooklyn federal judge requesting a lenient sentence for her reputed Colombo capo dad Dennis "Fat Dennie" DeLucia whom she says was supportive of her coming out process as reported by John Marzulli for the Daily News:  "My dad accepted me, embraced me and has supported me. His love and acceptance helped me through the rough times and growing pains."

The relationship between the Mafia and the gays has been a complicated one.  The mob historically has dominated gay bars, and even a few mobsters had a little sugar in their tanks.  Heck, Vito Genovese's second wife Anna was a lesbian who managed the mob boss's Club 82 in the East Village during the early 1950s which was popular with tourists for its drag performances.

Of course, being a gay mobster has its risks in the hypermasculine Mafia.  Former DeCavalcante boss John D'Amato was whacked in 1992 for being gay, and his killer Anthony Capo said "nobody's going to respect us if we have a gay homosexual boss sitting down discussing La Cosa Nostra business."  Similarly, Lucchese associate Al Visconti was whacked in 1991, and although there apparently were multiple reasons for the hit boss Vittore "Jesse" Amuso thought Visconti was "a disgrace to the Luchese family because he had a reputation of engaging in homosexual acts in prison" according to courtroom testimony from former capo Alphonse  D'Arco.

However, even the mob may be evolving much like President Obama on gay issues.  Last year John Gotti's widow Victoria defended John Travolota to play the late Gambino boss in a planned biopic notwithstanding accusations that the actor made untoward advances against male masseurs as reported by the Daily News:

"What difference does it make if he were gay?" Victoria Gotti told the Daily News in an expletive-filled defense of the actor, who's been embroiled by a sex scandal for more than a week. "Who the f--k really cares? Does it make him less of a beautiful human being? No. . . .  Leave him the f--k alone. Whatever the true story is, leave him with his dignity," she added.  "In the grand scheme of things, it really does not matter."

Perhaps Victoria said it best.

Blind item: What Former New York Governor Patronized Gay Bar Regents Row?

Celebrity gossip monger and intrepid crime reporter Lee Mortimer titillated his gentle readers across the nation with his syndicated column New York Confidential during the 1950s and 1960s, and among his blind items was that a former governor of the Empire State was among the prominent patrons of gay bar Regents Row.

Regents Row was operated by reputed mob associate Tommy Dowling and his boyfriend Lucky Moore in midtown Manhattan on East 43rd Street, and after it burnt down Mortimer wrote about the upscale establishment in his August 1, 1960 column:

The Regents Row situation grows curioser and curioser by the second.  Shortly before the fire which gutted the luxury club (a few days after I wrote about it) Regents Row's Tommy Dowling and Lucky Moore went to work for Peggy Fears in her oh, so gay Fire Islands Pines.  Right after the fire, Regents Row customers were advised there'd be a bigger and better club after Labor Day.  The owners thought they had $225,000 insurance.  It was $150,000.  It has not been paid as of this writing.  Among the innocent patrons of this club are some of New York's prominent citizens including a former governor, none of whom are aware of what I know.  I am being pressured from all sides to lay off.  I will not.

Mortimer never identified this "former governor" in his subsequent columns but at the time there were only four -- Herbert Lehman, Charles Poletti, Thomas Dewey and W. Averell Harriman -- and most likely Poletti, the youngest among them at 57-years-old, was the gay blade.

In 1960 Lehman was an octogenarian, and Regents Row was a lively place which was unlikely  to attract the walking dead.  Indeed, Lehman died of heart failure just three years later at the age of 85.  Dewey also can be eliminated as among the bar's patrons because if the former prosecutor who put Lucky Luciano behind bars were gay the vengeful mob would have ensured it became public knowledge or otherwise used against him.  Moreover, Dewey was among those who considered homosexuals as security risks during the cold war, and even if his anti-gay position were a hypocritical mask it's doubtful that he would recklessly expose himself at a well-known gay bar.  And Harriman was an incorrigible playboy who genuinely enjoyed the ladies.  In 1971 at 79-years-old the old dog married his third and final wife who was nearly 30 years his junior.

So that pretty much just leaves Poletti although it's hardly a conclusive answer to the question of what former New York governor was cavorting at Regents Row since he was twice married and had children.

In 1938 Poletti was elected Lieutenant Governor, and served out the few remaining weeks in the term of Governor Lehman who resigned on December 3, 1942 to accept a U.S. State Department position.  Poletti then went to Italy where he ultimately headed the Allied Military Government, and was closely advised by Vito Genovese who at the time was stealing army supplies to sell on the black market as reported by Tim Newark in his article "Fighting The Mafia In World War Two" for American Mafia.  The cozy relationship between Poletti and Genovese continued until Sargeant Orange C. Dickey from the Criminal Investigative Unit personally escorted the mobster back to New York to face a murder charge over the objections from military brass.  The murder charge against Genovese was dismissed after the witnesses against him suffered unfortunate demises. 

In New York's post-war years Genovese operated a string of gay bars out of which he trafficked heroin, and Poletti arbitrated labor disputes in the garment industry. Given the long-standing quiet tolerance of homosexuality within Italian culture and the mob's dominance over gay bars -- heck, Genovese's lesbian wife Anna even managed one -- Poletti certainly would not be uncomfortable patronizing Regents Row.  Contrary to popular opinion and revisionist history gay bars before the Stonewall Riots in 1969 were not all clandestine dives frequented by powerless people.  Regents Row in 1960 was a tony establishment patronized by an A-list crowd where a former governor could find his social peers.

Much of the success behind Regents Row which re-opened after the fire was attributed to Tommy Dowling.  In The Gay Insider, a popular guide to the gay scene in 1971, author John Francis Hunter reviewed Dowling's latest venture the Zodiac Uptown at 1487 First Avenue and gushed over the barkeep:

If for no other reason, you should come here because it's run by Tommy, one of the great gentleman/manager/hosts in Manhattan.  (Gentleman is an old-fashioned word, and Tommy is that, while being as up-to-date as a water mattress.)  He made of his celebrated Regents Row and Penthouse and Sewer gay retreats never-to-be-forgotten -- especially the last, which was the most nearly integrated (gay and straight), successful afterhours places ever.  Ask to meet him.  Wherever he is he runs a superior operation, and to him friendship with his gay patrons, no matter how casual, is everlasting.

Although there is no evidence to establish that Regents Row was either owned by or paid protection to the Mafia -- but keep in mind that in 1960 few gay bars were completely free of mob influence -- Dowling was convicted in February 1971 for his role in operating the Sewer at 9 East 16th Street together with Gambino soldier and heroin trafficker Anthony "Tony West" DeLutro and Harry Arduini as then reported by The New York Times:

The three men were found guilty of engaging in a retail liquor business, at the unlicensed bar in the basement of a loft building at 9 East 16th Street, without paying the Federal tax on retail liquor dealers.  The all-night bar operated for a year until it was closed May 18, 1969, when the three men were arrested.  Undercover agents of the Internal Revenue Service bought liquor at the bar, which had as many as 900 customers on a busy night.

According to FBI files gay crossdresser and Genovese soldier David Petillo had a hidden interest in an afterhours club in the late 1960s at 11 East 16th Street which perhaps was referring to the Sewer.

Apparently, Dowling quickly tired in 1960 of working for Peggy Fears on her Fire Island gay ventures after "too many arguments" according to Lee Mortimer.  (Curiously, Fears's former husband Alfred Cleveland Blumenthal was smuggling heroin into the country from Mexico for the Genovese family writes Juan Alberto Cedillo in his 2011 book La Cosa Nostra en Mexico.)  Dowling's boyfriend Lucky Moore left him in 1962 for Woolworth heir Jimmy Donahue, and then had the bad luck a year later to die of a Seconal overdose while on a Hawaiian holiday with the new squeeze.  And the discrete Dowling never divulged the personal secrets of the powerful men from New York's ruling class who frequented his gay bars. 

Charles Poletti died in 2002 at the age of 99, and even had a Queens power plant named after him for his service with the New York State Power Authority.

Further reading that may be of interest:

New York Confidential:  Lee Mortimer's 1950s Expose On The Mafia And Its Gay Bars

Italian Authorities: Calabrian Mafia Laundered Drug Money For Terrorist Group

Last week Italian authorities seized resort properties worth 450 million euros ($588 million) in coastal areas throughout the country's south which they suspect were money laundering operations run by the 'Ndrangheta or Calabrian Mafia, and after a series of arrests are further seeking one-time convicted terrorist Henry Fitzsimons who prosecutors claim is a front for the Irish Republican Army as reported by The Daily Mail:  "the IRA allegedly sent Fitzsimons to launder drug-trafficking profits with the help of the Italian mafia gang 'Ndrangheta."  Fitzsimmons apparently is on the the run from authorities, and last reported in Africa.  Through his attorney Fitzsimmons "has categorically denied the allegations" as reported by The Independent.

Among the misconceptions about the Mafia is that it never works with terrorists.  The fact is that the Mafia will do anything and become involved with anyone for a buck.

Indeed, the disclosure of State Department cables by Wikileaks revealed that the United States views the Mafia not only as a criminal threat but a terrorist threat.  For example, according to a June 6, 2008 diplomatic cable by J. Patrick Truhn, the U.S. general counsel in Naples, the Camorra or Neapolitan Mafia has provided Islamic terrorist groups with weapons in exchange for drugs:

A 2005 FBI intelligence assessment reported that "Criminal interaction between Italian organized crime and Islamic extremist groups provides potential terrorists with access to funding and logistical support from criminal organizations with established smuggling routes and an entrenched presence in the United States."  In a public statement given on April 19, 2004, Italy's national anti-Mafia prosecutor, Pierluigi Vigna, indicated a link between Islamic militant groups and the Camorra, stating that evidence existed implicating the Camorra in an exchange of weapons for drugs with Islamic terrorist groups.

Don't think Mafia families in the United States would betray the country for 30 pieces of silver?

Truth is American mobsters on the whole never have been a patriotic bunch.

For example, in 1945 Genovese mobster Paul "Lefty" Della Universita "arranged a heist from a lower Manhattan dock of morphine pills that were supposed to be sent to wounded soldiers overseas" as reported by Susannah Cahalan for the New York Post:   "he would find that the shipment was worth half a million dollars, making it the largest drug heist in American history at the time, which is confirmed by a New York Times newspaper clipping in 1945."

Although mob boss Vito Genovese seemingly answered the call of duty during World War II by acting as a guide and translator for U.S. Army officials in Italy he exploited the opportunity by stealing American food supplies for re-sale on the black market from which he "made a fortune" as reported by Tim Newark for American Mafia.

Stealing pain killers for wounded soldiers?  Stealing the food out of their mouths?  Is there no level to which these degenerate mobsters will not stoop?

The willingness of the Mafia to put profit ahead of country continues to make it a security threat in the United States particularly given its influence at some ports of entry as reported by The Associated Press:

"I don't believe the old idea that they're loyal Americans," said Joseph King, who teaches classes on terrorism and organized crime at New York's John Jay College. "They're in business, they don't care what it is, they're looking for money."

King, a retired customs official, said dockworker duties have changed over the years, with workers having less direct access to cargo as in the past. But many still hold positions of influence in determining which containers move off the piers.

"Everybody says: they (the mob) would never do that," King said of allowing terrorists access to the ports; "But if you agree to get a container through for a guy and he says: 'It's hashish,' what about the second time, when it could be nuclear material? They don't exercise customs, they don't open it and say: 'Yes, it's all hashish, thank you very much,' — they let the cargo through."

Sure, the Mafia promotes itself as patriotic; however, mobsters and their apologists have notorious reputations as liars, and they publicly espouse all kinds of honorable principles as cynical ruses in order to deflect attention away from their underworld activities.

Mobsters aren't honorable patriots; they're just common scoundrels.

Gil Reavill Provides Back Story On Mafia Summit

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was behind the biggest law enforcement intelligence failure of  the 20th century in repeatedly declaring that there was no such thing as the Mafia.

However, on November 14, 1957 state troopers raided the home of Joseph Barbara in Apalachin, NY where Italian crime bosses from across the country were meeting, and after the historic roundup even the good Director had to capitulate.

In his new book Mafia Summit:  J. Edgar Hoover, The Kennedy Brothers, and the Meeting that Unmasked the Mob author Gil Reavill provides the back story on the infamous meeting, and an excerpt is reprinted by the Daily News:  

On the agenda: heroin, Cuba, divvying up Albert Anastasia's piece of the pie. Also, the elephant in the room, how best to recognize Vito's status in the overheated, competitive world of the Five Families of New York City. 

Genovese's presence overwhelms the gathering. The "Right Man" is sitting right there. He wants to be crowned. He wants the capo dei capi, the boss-of-bosses title. With Costello wounded and out of the way, and Anastasia dead, who is there to deny him?

It doesn't look as though a simple "godfather" label is going to do it for Vito. Maybe just plain "God"? How about that? Would that satisfy his unquenchable thirst for power?

Following the Apalachin bust the FBI in 1958 released its so-called Mafia Monograph by which it at long last definitively recognized that "available evidence shows that beyond the shadow of a doubt, the Mafia does exist today in the United States, as well as in Sicily and Italy, as a vicious, evil, and tyrannical form of organized criminality."

New York Confidential: Lee Mortimer's 1950s Expose On The Mafia And Its Gay Bars

For decades the Mafia controlled gay bars, and in the 1950s Lee Mortimer was the first to unmask the relationship.  Mortimer was a hybrid crime reporter/gossip monger who penned the syndicated column New York Confidential which took a walk on the Big Apple's wild side.  The intrepid muckraker had a field day when he discovered that the wise guys were behind the so-called "daffodil dens."  Although a homophobic tone is pervasive throughout his writing -- Mortimer obviously relished coining terms by which to slur gays -- the clear target was the mobsters.  Indeed, Mortimer was a consistent crusader against the Mafia, and throughout his journalism career exposed a number of its rackets. 

Mortimer first took aim at the mob's pervasive involvement in gay bars in his 1952 book USA Confidential with co-author Jack Lait, and the pair claimed:

All fairy night clubs and gathering places are illegal, and operate only through pay-offs to the authorities. They are organized into a national circuit, controlled by the Mafia which also finds unique opportunity to sell dope in such dives. Many gangsters like it that way, too, after indoctrination in prison.

By the late 1950s Mortimer launched a campaign through his New York Confidential column to shine a light on the mob's role in gay bars.  Mortimer specifically named the establishments and their addresses, identified the wise guys who were behind them, and explained in detail how the racket worked including the use of front men or clean names so everything looked legitimate on paper and the use of bribe or ice payments to keep the precinct cops and liquor authorities at bay.

In his September 10, 1959 column Mortimer explained "how it works":

A "clean" man without a record is put on the licenses of queer dives and bust-out joints and gets paid from $50 to $100 a week for the use of his name and from then on the real ownership is never looked into except perfunctorily.  In addition to arrangements for the original okay monthly "ice" runs from $350 a month on a small operation to $600 a month for resorts grossing up to $4,000 a week, and more in proportion.  When a place gets "hot," the joints are told they've got to take a ten day suspension to cool off.  But if they get "too hot" then the intermediaries or lay-off men advise them in advance to "sell" to another guy with a clean sheet, who won't have any trouble passing the board and preserving the license.

Some of the gay bars may have been seedy dives and staffed with intimidating goons but they otherwise were sophisticated ventures.  Closely-held corporations through which the mob laundered its money sometimes provided financing for the gay bars and the purchase of the buildings out of which they operated, and white-collar professional teams which included lawyers and accountants structured the transactions.  None of this escaped the attention of Mortimer who wrote in a November 25, 1960 column:  "Be a good idea for one of the probes to go into the whole relationship if any between the mobsters and the real estate agents, lawyers shylocks and fixers who set up the homo joints and hire the Queens."

According to Mortimer all the gay bars were either owned by the mob or paid off the mob, and in a September 4, 1959 column he writes:

Greenwich Village is reserved exclusively for the Mob.  Non-Mob joints may operate uptown if they make their "fix" through the boys (some of whom have been named here).  If they don't see the right people they get knocked off while places next door, running even more openly, are not bothered.  Legitimate businessmen have great difficulty obtaining licenses, but Sing Sing graduates (working through the proper front men) seem to have no trouble. 

Mortimer notes the rich irony that "tough guy" mobsters were running bars "for the dainty hand-on-hippers," and sympathizes with the exploited patrons who are under the mob's thumb in an August 7, 1960 column:

Not one of the joints in this town catering to the so-called "unfortunates" is owned by one of the "unfortunates."  The Mob is in -- or back in  -- or protecting everyone and that's why they operate . . . It may be hard to believe that apes and goons like Tony Bender, Vito Genovese and all the other so-called tough guys, including imprisoned Frank Costello and exiled Joe Adonis collect tribute from the dainty hand-on-hippers, but they do.  They're the ones I’m gunning for, not the deviates who excuse their aberrations on the grounds of sickness.

Mortimer correctly identified mob boss Vito Genovese and his Greenwich Village capo Anthony "Tony Bender" Strollo as the queen bees behind the gay bars in the 1950s.  Others whom Mortimer identified with a hand in the racket at the time were Genovese capo Vincent Maura and Bonanno soldier Tony Mirra.  Mirra was the mobster who nearly twenty years later would unwittingly introduce undercover FBI agent Joe Pistone a/k/a Donnie Brasco to the Bonanno family.

Of course, taking on the mob was not without its risks, and Mortimer wrote about "threatening telephone calls" he received from "the boys" Vinnie Maura and Tony Mirra.  For example, on August 31, 1959 Mortimer ran the following alarm:

I'm still alive (but living on borrowed time).  This is another chapter on Tony Mirra, a low and despicable hoodlum now out on bail on a narcotics conspiracy conviction and Vinnie Bruno Mauro, a former small-time punk who tosses around a lot of weight as a lieutenant of fearsome Tony Bender.  I am a reporter, not a cop and usually do not volunteer knowledge to law enforcement agencies which have their own means of obtaining same.  I print it instead, which is how I make my living.  Apparently such exposures are hitting where it hurts.  I was "advised" to lay off.  When I failed to follow such advise, I was warned to lay off.  I have been threatened before and I have been slugged before.  The experience is no novelty, but it gets boring.  In order to ensure against a reputation (or in its event to guarantee that silencing me does not silence my information) I turned the names and a list of some 25 key establishments over to seven local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and you can be sure that the latter cannot be "reached."  Indeed if anything happens to me they'll look for those thugs first.  It would just be too bad for them if commies, Castro-lovers, or Sinatra-lovers got me instead.  (Maybe the mob should provide me with a bodyguard.)

It was not beyond Mortimer occasionally to flip the script on the mobsters.  For example, in his August 7, 1960 column Mortimer writes about visiting a gay bar at 15 Greenwich where "a gorilla followed us out and around the corner, but we turned the tables and followed the hood right back into the place."

Mortimer's New York Confidential column may have titillated the gentle readers but undoubtedly it also served as a guide for his gay readers:  Davi Club at 78th Street and Broadway ("lost its liquor license for the usual reasons" but "is in business bigger than ever selling 'set ups' to an 'all-boy' clientele which stands bumper-to-bumper at the bar and out into 78th causing a traffic hazard"); Calvin's at 55th and 3rd Avenue ("crowd starts early and by midnight the entire entourage is there"); The Lion on West 9th ("put on the Armed Forces Police index, but it's selling liquor and packed every night"); Frank's on East 81st Street ("a 'Raided Premises' sign in the window . . . but apparently it doesn't interfere with business as usual"); Regents Row at East 43 Street ("right after the fire, Regents Row customers were advised there'd be a bigger and better club after Labor Day"); and The Rendezvous on lower Madison Avenue ("another favorite rendezvous of the hand-on-hip set").

Gay historians often unfairly malign Lee Mortimer as little more than a hateful man obsessed with shutting down gay bars.  The characterization is not accurate.  No doubt he shared some of the prevailing homophobia of his time.  However, in many of his books and columns he wrote about enjoying his visits to the gay bars -- "tourists come to gape (I did)" -- and in an August 1, 1960 column wrote the following:

I'm no crusader or moralist.  I'm not out to get anyone.  I know what goes on in big cities (and on farms, too) and I'm not trying to spoil anyone's fun except the gangsters, crooked politicians and a handful of crooked cops and liquor investigators who cut in on it.

Mortimer's purported obsession with gay bars is overblown by his critics, and they miss the point of his campaign which was to bring down the mob and clean up local government as he eloquently expressed in his September 9, 1959 column:

The blind alley of gangdom-influence-pressure ends in a solid wall which none may crack or vault.  These few paragraphs of mine may seem to be minor league stuff in face of the jungle of crime, murder, terror and fear that the streets of New York have become.  But the conditions of which I write tie in with the other in the general breakdown of law and order, the indifference of the courts and the "pressures" on honest cops.  Incidentally, everyone has "interviewed" me except the D.A.'s office which still maintains its monumental indifference.

More than fifty years later the mob allegedly still has a hidden hand in a few gay bars in New York, and the D.A.'s office "still maintains its monumental indifference."

Further reading that may be of interest:

My Brush With The Mob