Operation Underworld: How the Mafia and U.S. Government Teamed Up to Win World War II

by Matthew Black

because President Roosevelt had declared that the country’s six hundred thousand nonnaturalized Italians be classified as “enemy aliens.”

Every officer at ONI had been trained to know that developing informants was essential for counterintelligence work, and on the waterfront, B-3 was coming up short.4

“Today’s threat to our national security is not a matter of military weapons alone. We know of new methods of attack—the Trojan Horse, the Fifth Column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs and traitors are the actors in this new energy.” These threats were exactly what Haffenden was

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It mandated that all people of Japanese descent who lived in the western United States be interned at several designated camps.

The city’s population mostly stayed the same, as the largest manufacturing city in the country failed to secure early war production contracts. Small factories, which New York City was full of, had nothing to produce, and more jobs were actually lost than gained.

Saboteurs in the city were the biggest threat to ships in port, but for the entire US Atlantic Fleet, there loomed a much more dangerous, and lethal, unseen enemy—German U-boats.

U-boat attacks were so effective on the US merchant fleet that England was being choked off from US supplies,

American supplies—packaged with their name branding—were seen belowdecks inside German U-boats.

Would Hogan be willing to turn over the information he’d obtained from various waterfront criminal prosecutions to the navy for review?

Hogan told MacFall that Gurfein was the expert, and not only would he tell the navy what he knew, but he would also arrange for his underworld contacts to supply them with whatever other information they needed.

Gurfein assured MacFall that if any of these racketeers did anything to hurt the navy, there were sanctions the DA’s office could impose on them.

wanted to be thought of as an American. He despised the Italian criminal gangs of New York, as he felt they gave his ethnicity a bad name. To combat them, he had gone to law school, before becoming an investigator in the DA’s office.

“Since survival of the United States and successful carrying out of our war effort is involved, every means available to the armed forces and agencies of our Government should be utilized.”22

Lanza. Thus, he had no idea about the intoxicating effect his journey into the underworld’s domain would have on his life. To accomplish his mission, Haffenden needed someone to get him inside this realm, and Lanza was the chosen beast to meet him at the gates of the underworld.

“pistol locals”—so named because their meetings were brought to order by a gangster banging the butt of a gun instead of a gavel—and

Lanza was not only a founding member of Local 359, but he was also the one who had started the Patrol Association nearly twenty years earlier. If the fishing captains didn’t like being shaken down, the Association was happy to let the fish rot in the cargo holds of their boats.

Espy was just a fill-in for the role, as Lanza’s chosen leader for the Patrol Association was currently in jail for the same extortion charges that Lanza was facing.

“Fulton Fish Market.”

sold over fifty different kinds of fresh and saltwater fish, brought in from all over the country and the world.

The man, just like everyone else who ran a stall at Fulton, kicked back some of his earnings to Lanza for the privilege of selling his product.

Over the course of the next week, Lanza, Sacco, and Treglia talked to hundreds of Italian fishing crews, and all were given the same orders to contact Lanza if one of them saw a U-boat.

Prior to the first week of April 1942, fifty more Allied ships had been sunk in the Atlantic during the month of March

If he could get information about resupply missions to U-boats, then maybe he could shut them down, and the threat to US coastal waters would subside, or perhaps even disappear.

A fishing boat captain had spotted a U-boat on the surface off of Montauk Point, on the far eastern end of Long Island, just 115 miles due west of Manhattan.4

What was a U-boat doing on the surface so close to the shore?

That something else, as Haffenden knew, could have been a resupply launched from Long Island itself. And if that was the case, then whoever rendezvoused with that U-boat might still be on the island.

Or maybe the enemy was thinking of landing a team of commandos who could covertly infiltrate the East Coast, with intentions of sabotage.

Trucks ran supplies—mainly fish and fuel—in and out of the fishing port, and it was possible that the enemy could be using them or their resources to ferry supplies. It would be difficult to hide purchasing and ferrying enough oil to supply a U-boat. Anyone who could pull off such a mission had to have access to large amounts of fuel.

For centuries, American war planners had seen Long Island as the most likely site of a foreign invasion from a European

proximity to New York City made it the perfect staging area to launch an assault on America’s biggest and most important city.

Montauk Lighthouse, which was the most significant navigation p...

shipping and German U-boats in the Easter...

Treglia and the Sacco brothers were still visiting Fulton and Lanza nearly every day, along with a number of other officers and civilian agents.

He’d find the boat he was looking for, and all he had to say to the captain was “Put him on,” and the captain always complied.

radios aboard so they could immediately communicate to the navy if they spotted a U-boat.

their reach into other states along the East Coast had little to do with the criminal empire that they were a part of and more to do with their membership in the United Seafood Workers Union, which was a nationwide organization.

The irony was, though, for all the reach that Lanza now showed up and down the Atlantic coast, he was still struggling to secure the Port of New York. Despite

Those locations were the West Side of Manhattan and Brooklyn. The West Side of Manhattan was where hundreds of thousands of troops were loaded onto transports, and where Normandie was now laterally recumbent.

was dominated by the Irish.

Not only did he have an Irish wife, which the Irish hated, but Lanza had also murdered an Irish gang member fifteen years earlier.

West Side—President of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) Joe Ryan and his right-hand man, Jerry Sullivan—were also Irish.

Brooklyn Navy Yard was starting to send troops too.

The problem that Lanza faced in Brooklyn stemmed from the fact that he was under indictment.

The other problem that Lanza had, and perhaps the most significant, was that he was not a very powerful gangster.

This was by design—the design of his imprisoned boss, Lucky Luciano. Perhaps it was time to talk to the acting boss of his family—Frank Costello—but even he would have trouble exerting influence over the other families.

Lanza also explained that Luciano was the only one who could cross the racial divide between the Irish and the actual Italians on the waterfront.

“The word of Charlie,” Lanza said, “may give me the right-of-way.”

Haffenden knew that recruiting the man who was believed to be the country’s top criminal to help the navy cou...

These informants would represent the top echelon of Mafia leadership. “I’ll talk to anybody,” Haffenden said at the time. “A priest, a bank manager, a gangster, the devil himself, if I can get the information I need. This is a war.”

In order to set up a meeting with Luciano in prison, Haffenden would have to get the approval of the New York Commissioner of Correction, John Lyons.