Volume 1 of The Borgata Trilogy
At different times he compares Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel to Alexander the Great or Marc Anthony chasing after Cleopatra.
Lucky Luciano, deported to Italy and plotting his return to the United States, was like Napoleon at Elba.
Vito Genovese, first in bed with Mussolini and then a translator for the Allies following the invasion of Sicily, was a modern-day Alcibiades, the fourth-century BC Greek statesman who constantly shifted his allegiance.
This is Louis Ferrante writing about the early days of organized crime in “Borgata: Rise of Empire, A History of the American Mafia.” It‘s a fascinating first volume of what is billed as “The Borgata Trilogy.”
Smoothly written and impeccably researched, it traces the Mafia from Sicily to the United States at the turn of the last century, includes an important stop in New Orleans, and focuses on the major gangsters – primarily Jewish and Italian – who created what we now know as Cosa Nostra. (Borgata was the term they used for a crime family.) It is a serious, historical look at organized crime written not by an academician or a journalist, but by someone who lived the life. His insights are often personal and always informative.
One example is his take when writing about Luciano, who lived at the posh Waldorf Towers but had been sentenced to prison at Clinton Correctional Facility [sometimes referred to as Dannemora, as it served as a mental hospital known as Dannemora Hospital for the Criminally Insane] after his conviction for running a prostitution ring.
“I have stayed at the Waldorf Towers and I have lived under the gun towers at Clinton,” Ferrante writes, “so I can speak to the contrast; it is like exiting your luxurious suite and stepping into an empty elevator shaft that drops you into the Ninth Circle of Dante’s Inferno.”
Another is this comment about an erroneous but long-held belief about the motive for the 1974 bombing of Frank Costello’s marble mausoleum: “Here, again, we see history written and repeated by people who have no idea what they are talking about.”
The conventional wisdom had been that the bombing was an underworld show of disrespect toward Costello. In fact, Ferrante who said he knew one of the bombers, writes it was carried out by a crew of mobsters who “figured, at the very least, his skeletal hand would be adorned with one of his many solid-gold wristwatches and pinky rings.”
Ferrante notes that gold had a value of $180 an ounce at the time of the bombing, more than three times what it was worth at the time of Costello’s burial two years earlier.
Ferrante’s bona fides are as good as or better than anyone offering up insights and anecdotes about “the life” on social media today. New York-born and raised, he turned to a life of crime as a teenager and rose through the ranks of the Gambino crime family, eventually heading a gang of stick-up artists who turned hijacking into a major money maker for the organization.
He refused to cooperate after being arrested and did more than eight years following a series of convictions in the late 1990s. He readily acknowledges that his time in prison was a game-changer. He began to read….and read….and read. That was how he survived life in the penitentiary at Lewisburg and how he became a self-educated and savvy commentator on a wide range of topics.
Since his release in 2003, he has written several books and appeared on and produced documentaries. “Borgata Rise of Empire” may be his most ambitious project. The first volume ends in the late 1950s and teases what figures to be a major part of volume two – the mob and the Kennedys.
What volume one offers is a detailed account of the life and times of the major figures who created the American underworld. Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, Al Capone, Luciano, Costello, Genovese, and Siegel all have their turn center stage. But the description of who they were and what they did is sometimes at odds with the conventional and, Ferrante would argue, the distorted image that has been replicated in books, movies and newspaper accounts of their lives.
Luciano, for example, owed much of his success and perhaps his life to Lansky who went out of his way to burnish the image of the emerging Mafioso after Lucky had cooperated with investigators following one of his first drug busts. Throughout his life, Ferrante notes, Lucky was only a sometimes advocate of omerta.
Frank Costello, the “prime minister” of the mob, was a whiner and weak leader who, long before Tony Soprano, was attending regular sessions with a shrink. Costello was a major earner and built an empire but in Ferrante’s telling, he was more concerned with his standing in New York high society than his status in the underworld.
When journalists asked the shrink about Costello, the good doctor replied that he had advised Costello to “mingle with a better class of people.” Costello’s retort, according to Ferrante, was that he had introduced the doctor to a better class of people than those to whom the doctor had introduced him.
“Regardless of who could boast of classier friends,” Ferrante writes, “the damage was done and the mob was hysterically laughing at Costello while questioning his mental fitness. But the exposé did nothing to diminish Costello’s stature in polite society…”
And to Costello, that was what mattered most.
Vito Genovese, who outmaneuvered Luciano and Costello to take control of their Borgata, was an underworld gossip monger who spread rumors of mental incompetence while setting up rivals.
Willie Moretti, an ally of Luciano and Costello, was the first to go after questions about his mental stability became an issue following his bizarre appearance before a Senate subcommittee investigating organized crime.
Genovese proposed what Ferrante describes as a “mercy killing” in order to keep a demented Moretti from talking too much. The hit on Costello – botched by Vincent Gigante – was another move orchestrated by Genovese as was the assassination of Albert Anastasia in a barber shop at the Park Sheraton Hotel. Both came after Genovese promoted gossip about their mental fitness.
Ferrante provides detailed and insider accounts of all three events and the treacherous moves by Genovese to set the hits in motion and to avoid repercussions from others in the underworld.
Of Anastasia’s death — he was riddled with bullets as he sat in a barber chair with a hot towel covering his face — Ferrante writes, “At the tender age of nineteen, Albert Anastasia was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the electric chair. He spent a grueling eighteen months on death row while his attorneys worked on his appeal and his brothers murdered the four primary witnesses against him. When he was finally granted a new trial, the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. Anastasia had escaped one chair only to die in another….”
Prohibition, the mob in Cuba, the national mob conventions in Atlantic City (1929), Havana (1946) and Apalachin (1957), the bumbling of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the insight and vision of Jewish mobsters who, more than their Italian counterparts, shaped the American Cosa Nostra are all part of Ferrante’s world view.
So are amusing anecdotes and riffs about Marco Polo, Lawrence of Arabia and the murder of “Mad King” Ludwig II of Bavaria. Ferrante, demonstrating that he was reading more than just mob stories while in jail, uses his broad knowledge of history to paint his portrait of the American underworld.
It’s more complex, erudite and compelling than anything you’ll hear on a podcast and ends with a hint of what is to come.
“Robert F. Kennedy billed himself as the ‘one man in America who was above and beyond a price,’’’ Ferrante writes at the conclusion of volume one. “He would launch a relentless crusade against the mafia and awaken a slumbering FBI, placing dons across the country in his crosshairs – until the crosshairs were turned on his older brother, the president of the United States.”
