Joseph Bruno's Blog, page 51
February 10, 2013
January 18, 2013
January 17, 2013
January 16, 2013
Joe Bruno on the Mob – Virginia Hill – Part Four
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009CGA74M
On June 10, 1947, Hill was summoned by the mob to fly to Chicago. They didn’t tell her the reason, but Hill, being a seasoned mob moll, figured it must have something to do with Bugsy Siegel. Once in Chicago, Hill was ordered to fly straight to France. If Siegel asked any questions, she was to tell him she was going to France to buy expensive wine for the Flamingo, which she had done in the past.
In France, Hill phoned Siegel about her “plans.” It’s not clear if Siegel bought her explanation or not, but he pleaded with Hill to come back to California and stay with him at her home in Beverly Hills. Hill refused, knowing if she was right about Siegel’s eminent demise, she might get caught in the crossfire. Hill was too experienced a mob associate to risk her life for a man who maybe she loved and maybe she didn’t love. Besides, with Siegel gone, Hill figured she’d get more opportunities to make money with the mob. What Hill didn’t know was that the mob didn’t trust her either, but that they figured Hill could be useful to them in the future, even if only for bedtime escapades with the top mobsters she had previously sexually serviced.
On the night of June 20, 1947, a sharpshooter named Frank Carranzo held an army carbine and waited patiently outside the back window of 810 N. Linden Drive in Beverly Hills, a house rented by Hill that once belonged to silent movie star Rudolph Valentino. Carranzo had been laying down on his stomach military style for hours waiting for his prey.
In the upstairs bedrooms of the house was Hill’s brother Chick, bedding down Hill’s secretary Jeri Mason. Also upstairs was a West Coast gangster named Allen Smiley.
Around 10:30 pm, Siegel, wearing a brown pinstriped three-piece suit, turned the key in the lock of the front door. He slipped into the house and sauntered into the living room. Siegel switched on the living room lights and slouched comfortably on the couch; his left profile facing the sniper’s window. He picked up a copy of the local newspaper, and before he could turn a single page, Carranzo fired four .30-06 caliber bullets into Siegel’s body. The first bullet hit Siegel in the left side of the face. The second bullet shattered Siegel’s nose, and the other two bullets broke his ribs and tore apart his lungs. The gangster died instantly.
At exactly 11:00 A.M., Jack Dragna got a call from Carranzo, who said, “The insect was killed.” Without saying another word, Carranzo hung up the phone.
The Los Angeles’ Coroner’s Report (#37448) stated the cause of death was cerebral hemorrhage. His death certificate (Registrar’s #816192) stated the cause of death was “homicide- gunshot wounds to the head.”
Even though Siegel’s death made the front page of all the newspapers, the police hardly cared a famous gangster was hit in their jurisdiction
One hardened flatfoot told the nationwide press, “When you stick your finger into a buzz saw you can hardly tell which tooth of the saw hit it. This rat, Siegel, didn’t have a friend in the world outside of a couple of movie stars. He double crossed everybody in the narcotics rackets, not to mention bookmaking and slot machines.
“Who killed him? Well, you might say he killed himself – by degrees. The process started
in New York when he got to be a big shot in a West Side mob. He had a gang that would
break the arm of a man they had never seen for as little as $10; kill a stranger for $50.
“Siegel was the boss, but he wasn’t content to give orders and collect the fee. He had to see the victim suffer, sometimes die. He liked to do the job himself. That’s how he got the name of ‘Bugsy.’ Other mobsters said he was crazy to take such chances, but Siegel seemed to delight in hurting people—as long as he couldn’t get hurt in the process.
“He had a hand in the vice racket and, as a lad, he stole from blind men’s cups. Any one of a thousand persons had a reason for killing him and would have if they could. But if you really want some information, talk to Virginia Hill.”
Yet, certain people saw a softer and kinder side of the man known as “Bugsy.”
Lou Wiener Jr., Siegel’s Las Vegas attorney, told the press, “When Siegel got killed you wouldn’t believe how many employees of the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund broke down in tears (Siegel gave liberally to this fund- with stolen money, of course). He was very generous with the help and very well-liked. He was good to people. He was good to me and my wife.”
Siegel was so well-liked, only five blood relatives attended his funeral. All his mob associates, some of whom had ordered his death, gave Siegel the ultimate insult – they ignored his death.
Within minutes of Siegel’s demise, the mob took over the Flamingo’s operation. Moe Sedway, Gus Greenbaum, and a mob associate named Morris Rosen, stormed into the Flamingo and announced to everyone that they were the new bosses. Rosen assembled a group of investors, including Sedway, Greenbaum, and Meyer Lansky, to raise $3.9 million to buy the property from Siegel’s Nevada Projects Corporation.
The resort was renamed “The Fabulous Flamingo” and the hotel’s gaming license was
issued to Sanford Adler, who served as operator and “front man” for the mobsters/investors until 1948, when Greenbaum took over the show. With Greenbaum in charge and Siegel not there to skim the profits, and the Fabulous Flamingo showed a profit of $4 million in Greenbaum’s first year as boss.
To add insult to injury, when it was renovated in 1993, the Fabulous Flamingo’s leadership, now the Hilton Corporation, tore down Siegel’s private suite near the pool. In 1997, the Flamingo celebrated its 50th anniversary and not a word was mentioned about Siegel. It was as if Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel had never existed.
A spokesman for the hotel explained to the press, “The ‘Bugsy’ image was not something that was particularly endearing to the Flamingo or Hilton. This was not George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. We’re talking about a robber, rapist, and murderer. Those are not endearing qualities.”
January 14, 2013
January 12, 2013
Joe Bruno on the Mob – Virginia Hill – Part One
http://www.amazon.com/Mobsters-Gangs-Crooks-Creeps-ebook/dp/B0058J44QO/ref=zg_bs_11010_1
Virginia Hill was a rough and tumble broad, and people said she was devastated when her mobster/boyfriend – Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel – was shot to death at Hill’s swank Beverly Hills home. However, that was a fantasy perpetrated by the gullible press. Hill could have cared less about Siegel; she only cared about where her next buck was coming from, and with Siegel dead, it certainly wasn’t coming from him.
Hill, an aspiring actress (but not good enough to earn a living doing so in nearby Hollywood), was not only indifferent to Siegel’s demise, but, in fact, she knew about the hit in advance and thought she was next on the mob’s list of people to die.
After Hill was tipped off by a mob pal that Siegel was being fit for a casket, she hightailed it to France, just days before “Bugsy,” sitting comfortably on Hill’s couch reading the newspaper, was blasted in the face with four .30 caliber bullets, shot from a rifle through an open window. When the police arrived at Hill’s digs, Siegel was quite dead; his right eye lying on the floor 15 feet from his blood-stained body.
Hill, one of ten children, was born on August 26, 1916 in Bessemer, Ala. Her father, Mack Hill, was a horse trader and he told the press that Hill was not given much attention by her siblings, so she made plenty of friends of both sexes; friendships she bought with cold hard cash not honorably earned.
George Hill said, “I remember one year I bought Tabby (we called Virginia ‘Tabby’ after a cat in the comic section) four different sets of books while she stayed in the same grade. It seemed that she would sell the books and spend the money for presents for her little friends. She had a lot of them around her all the time.”
When Hill was already famous for running around with a string of mobsters, George Hill told a newspaper reporter, “One time Tabby charged several alarm clocks to my account and then gave them away to the playmates who looked up to her, just as her frequent guests of
‘The Nightclub World’ were to do later for Tabby’s generosity.”
In the early 1930’s, when Virginia was 14-years-old, Hill’s mother and father separated. Hill moved to Marietta, Ga. with her mother, grandmother – Mrs. J. P. Reid- and two brothers. By this time, Hill’s body had filed out considerably. She was already 5-feet-two-inches tall, with long legs, dark hair and an olive complexion.
Despite the objections of her mother and grandmother, Hill rode horses bareback and barelegged, and she also swam in the nude in public lakes and streams. This caught the attention of several young men, and soon Hill became sexually active. 21-year-old George Rodgers became enamored with Hill, and in 1933, the two married. The newlyweds left Marietta for the big city of Chicago, where Hill hopped to gain fame and fortune as a dancer.
Unfortunately for Rodgers, he was not included in Hill’s plans.
In Chicago, Hill, after dying her brown hair bright red, dumped Rodgers and got a job as a waitress at the San Carlo Italian Village, a mob-run exhibit at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Hill was paid only $20 a week by the mob, so to supplement her income, Hill worked as a prostitute; and she didn’t work cheap. While toiling mostly on her back, Hill became pals with several Chicago mobsters, including Joey Epstein, who was Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik’s chief accountant. Guzik was the money man for the Chicago Outfit, and Epstein helped Guzik launder the Outfit’s illegal cash and he invested it in legal businesses like the San Carlo Italian Village.
By 1934, it was accepted around town that Hill was Joey Epstein’s gal. However, those in the know knew that was a canard, since Epstein was a quiet but confirmed homosexual. Epstein was basically a “beard” for Hill, and he liberally passed Hill around to his mobster pals.
Soon, Hill became so well-known and desired by mobsters; she blatantly performed fellatio on several top Chicago Outfit mobsters at a 1936 Christmas Party thrown by Charlie Fischetti and his wife. Fischetti, Al Capone’s cousin, was an influential Chicago mobster, who was known for fixing elections, in addition to getting friendly judges appointed to the bench.
Fischetti, in fact, owned Hill, and in 1937, he ordered Hill to move to New York City to get her clutches into New York mobster, Joe “Adonis” Doto, whom the Chicago mob thought was keeping substantial amounts of cash that should have been sent to Chicago instead.
While romancing Adonis (Nobody called him by his real name Doto), Hill met degenerate killer Bugsy Siegel in a Brooklyn bar. Siegel had been big in the Big Apple during Prohibition, when he and his long-time partner Meyer Lansky joined up with the Italian mob led by Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello. This alliance made all four men very rich, but Siegel was loose cannon, who enjoyed killing as much as he enjoyed counting money.
On the night they met, Siegel took Hill to a fancy hotel and they spend the night banging the bed sheets. Hill later says that night was the best sex she ever had.
Soon, Siegel was dispatched to California by his New York partners where he was to supervise and consolidate the gambling, racetrack, and bookmaking rackets in the sunny state. However, mob leaks said Siegel was sent packing because his gratuitous violence was getting in the way of the mob earning money.
Hill’s affair with Adonis lasted two tumultuous years, and in May of 1938, when Hill had garnered all the information on Adonis that Fischetti needed (she could find no evidence Adonis was skimming cash), Hill became a courier for the mob, delivering cash to mobsters all over the country. Hill even traveled as far as Switzerland with bags of cash to deposit in numbered, untraceable mob bank accounts.
Bea Sedway, the wife of mobster Moe Sedway, who was New York mob-mastermind Meyer Lansky’s top lieutenant and a pal of Siegel since they were kids, said of Hill, “She was smart and she knew how to keep her mouth shut.”
December 31, 2012
2012 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 310,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 6 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!
Click here to see the complete report.
December 22, 2012
Joe Bruno on the Mob – Three Hells Angels Charged With Running a Canadian Drug Ring With Mexican Ties
http://www.amazon.com/Mobsters-Gangs-Crooks-Creeps-ebook/dp/B0058J44QO/ref=zg_bs_11010_1
Nov. 1, 2012,
Three men with links to the Hells Angels have been charged with running a mass Canadian drug operation with ties to deadly Mexican drug cartels. The three men are: West Point Hells Angel Larry Amero; Shane (Wheels) Maloney, a B.C. native living in Quebec; and Rabih Alkhalil, a former Lower Mainland resident. Amero and Maloney are already in custody. Police are still hunting for Alkhalil, but so far to no avail.
The three men face an array of charges, including conspiracy, trafficking, and working for the benefit of a criminal organization. According to the Vancouver Sun, Amero and his associates were said to be “Part of a B.C. gang alliance dubbed the ‘Wolf Pack’ that was locked in a bloody war with rivals from the Dhak-Duhre crime group.”
The head of British Columbia’s anti-gang agency said to the press, “These three men are key figures in B.C.’s gang conflict.”
Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit Chief Officer Dan Malo confirmed that the B.C. anti-gang agency has been working with its Quebec counterparts on this organized crime case.
“Gang members continue to spread their tentacles from B.C. to other provinces,” Malo said. “These guys are on the radar of CFSEU-BC and law enforcement right across Canada. As we see with the arrests today, the intelligence sharing and cooperation among law enforcement is unparalleled.”
Amero and Maloney, both 35, and Alkhalil, 25, are the alleged kingpins of the cross-country cocaine ring that led to 103 arrests in late October by the Sûreté du Québec in Ontario and Quebec.
B.C. Justice Minister Shirley Bond said the multiple arrests will make the streets safer across the entire country of Canada.
“B.C. invests in public safety and supports the CFSEU so that they can contribute to investigations like this,” Ms. Bond said. “It’s essential for us to participate in these coordinated cross-Canada investigations and be able to contribute officers and expertise to make our province and country safer.”
The Canadian gang leaders did not get their drugs locally, but in fact, imported their babania from Mexico, several hundred miles to the south.
SQ Insp. Michel Forget told reporters at provincial police headquarters in Montreal, the drug gang “Used a middleman to cooperate with Mexican drug cartels and appeared to have the capacity to import and distribute about 75 kilograms of cocaine per week. This group did not hesitate to use violence to take control and expand their territories.”
During the mass arrests in October, police also seized an arsenal of weapons, including 400 firearms and1,486 sticks of dynamite.
Amero made headlines in August 2011 when he barely escaped death in an assassination attempt in Kelowna that left him seriously wounded and his Red Scorpion pal Jonathan Bacon dead. Amero was a leading figure in the Hells Angels White Rock chapter before joining the Surrey-based West Point group in early 2012. Since his scrape with death, Amero has been laying low in Montreal. However, Amero was seen by undercover agents travelling regularly back and forth between Quebec and B.C., and he was also seen in in Vancouver.
As for Maloney, The Vancouver Sun wrote, “Maloney, part of Montreal’s Irish West End gang, was talking to real estate agents about purchasing Lower Mainland property just this past summer. He had been staying in Yaletown for long stretches of time over the last year. CFSEU officers were tailing him on a visit here in July. He was stopped and arrested for breaching bail conditions related to Montreal charges laid last year when Maloney and another Hells Angel associate allegedly brutally beat a Montreal police officer who was on vacation in Mexico and took a photo of the bikers in a bar.”
Alkhalil, who has a warrant out for his arrest, grew up in North Vancouver, but has spent most of his life in Ottawa. Police said they don’t know his current whereabouts, but are exhausting all possible avenues to precipitate his arrest.
Two of Alkhalil’s brothers have been murdered in B.C. in the last decade. One was shot to death in Surrey. The other died in the infamous Loft Six nightclub shooting in downtown Vancouver. Another Alkhalil brother, Nabil, has been ordered deported because of a cocaine trafficking conviction in Ontario.
Despite the stalwart efforts of the Canadian police and their anti-gang agencies, the arrest and possible convictions of Amero, Maloney, and Alkhalil will do little to stem the plague of drugs distributed throughout Canada. If we’ve learned anything about organized crime in the past 50 years – when one gangster is arrested, ten others line up to take his place; especially when drugs are involved.
There’s tons of money to be made in drugs, and like one American mobster once said to his cohort, “I know it’s dangerous work, but if we don’t do it, someone else will. And someone else will get rich instead of us.”
Case closed.
