Gangster picnic

Mafia Summit

J. Edgar Hoover, the Kennedy Brothers, and the Meeting That Unmasked the Mob

by Gil Reavill

Thomas Dunne Books

Who drives a limo down a dirt road?

Sgt. Ed Croswell of the New York State Police just couldn’t get past that puzzler, as he sat in his unmarked cop car in woodsy upstate Apalachin, pulled off to the side of muddy, bumpy McFall Road in autumn 1957 looking at the Chrysler Crown Imperial parked outside a stone farmhouse.

Maybe if it had just been the one well-polished land boat, Sgt. Croswell would’ve brushed it off. But there were a dozen parked alongside the driveway or pulled into a field by the rustic farm estate. Lincolns, Cadillacs, Continentals.

And maybe if one hadn’t actually been painted an ostentatious coral pink.

“Request backup,” Croswell, 44, called in to his dispatcher.

The owner of the fieldstone ranch home was Joseph Barbara, owner of a bottling company in the nearby Binghamton area occasionally known to mingle with unsavory business associates. A few rumors of some off-the-books distilleries. Nothing major.

What Croswell didn’t know was that inside Barbara’s farmhouse was a gathering of more than 100 mobsters, among them heads of organized crime from New York’s Five Families, as well as underbosses and made men from 13 states plus Cuba and Sicily. It was the largest-ever meeting of the most powerful players in the Mafia, a sitdown to eat some veal, drink wine and talk rackets and territories at the peak of La Cosa Nostra’s influence in America.

When Sgt. Croswell’s backup cars arrived around 1:30 in the afternoon to form a roadblock, the mobsters went scurrying — about half of them out the back door and past branches into the wet, slippery woods. Just picture it: three dozen wiseguys soaking their shiny shoes stumbling through creeks and snagging their pinstriped suits trying to clamber over barbed-wire cattle fencing.

“Which way to Pennsylvania?” one goombah asked a very confused dairy farmer after emerging from the underbrush.

Hours later, cops picked up two more tough guys miles away on a country road, mud-caked from the knees down and covered in burs.

“We’re from New Jersey,” one said with a smirk. “We’re out here looking for real estate.”

In a way, that was true. The main topic up for discussion at the Apalachin summit — recounted in journalist Gil Reavill’s new history, “Mafia Summit” — was how to divide turf after the whacking of kingpin Albert Anastasia by rival Vito Genovese three weeks earlier. Anastasia’s base was the waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and everyone wanted a piece — most notably fast-rising Carlo Gambino.

Anastasia’s docks had always been a prize, from skimming off the longshoremen’s union to stealing transported goods. In the 1950s, a vastly more profitable racket was aided by control of the ports: drug smuggling.

With the deported Lucky Luciano back in Sicily and running operations overseas, the mob’s “French Connection” heroin pipeline was generating $350 million a year, from the poppy fields of Turkey through processing plants in Sicily and finally shipping principally from Marseilles into New York Harbor.

Genovese was getting in on the heroin windfall at the retail level — through the many nightclubs and gay bars the mobster secretly controlled in the city. When the favored method of smuggling shifted from cargo ships to less obvious and less inspected cruise ships, Genovese seized most of Anastasia’s cut. Cruise ships don’t dock in Red Hook. They dock on Manhattan’s West Side — Genovese’s turf.

A showdown loomed, with Anastasia making noise for compensation.

On Oct. 25, 1957, the well-groomed Anastasia went for a haircut at Grasso’s Barber Shop in the lobby of the Park Sheraton Hotel on Seventh Avenue in Midtown. When two gunmen came through the door, the barber, manicurist and shoeshine kid all hit the deck.

Anastasia, delirious from the five bullets in his chest, desperately grasped for a gun that wasn’t there in his waistband, lunged not at the hit men but at their reflections in the barber’s mirror and finally dragged down a shelf of grooming products with him to the floor.

Weeks later, a chance to divide the spoils.

Inside the Apalachin retreat was a bar so big it belonged in a city tavern, with souvenir swizzle sticks from all around the Mafia universe: the Sans Souci in Havana, the Latin Quarter and Copacabana in New York, the Hotel Casey in Scranton.

With Genovese calling for a meeting, it was agreed that Joe Barbara’s tucked-away farm ranch would be a perfect setting: It was thought to be an undetectable location, plenty roomy enough for 100 mobsters, and it was convenient for those driving in from places like Cleveland or Pittsburgh. Barbara was also one of Joe Bonanno’s peripheral guys. And with New York boss Bonanno now representing the closest thing to a challenge to Genovese’s dominance, to assure him there was no follow-up hit in the works, Bonanno was allowed to choose the site.

All-powerful Commission members Genovese, Bonanno, Joe Profaci, Sam Giancana of Chicago, Steven Magaddino of Buffalo and Santo Trafficante of Miami all gathered in the living room. On the agenda: heroin, Cuba and Anastasia’s Brooklyn territory.

But first, a warm-up ruling. Waiting out in the garage was Carmine Lombardozzi, a middle-tier earner who had to answer for failing in the past to kick up sufficient tribute from a jukebox racket. It’s Lombardozzi’s lucky day. No death sentence meted out by the Commission. Just a $10,000 make-good penalty.

On heroin, it’s agreed that to insulate themselves from the new Narcotics Control Act’s stiffer mandatory prison sentences, the actual importation and smuggling would be spun off to subsidiary crews.

Then, with Carlo Gambino waiting in the wings as inheritor of Anastasia’s waterfront, there was an interruption at the door.

A local fishmonger named Bartolo Guccia, there to drop off a delivery for the meeting, had just pulled up in his clunker truck outside, having driven past a string of state cruisers lined up out of sight down McFall Road.

He said a single word to the mobsters standing in the driveway: “Roadblock.”

A few hours later, 60 wiseguys filled Sgt. Croswell’s station house (the others mostly played it smart and sat tight inside Barbara’s farmhouse, as police had no search warrant).

Croswell had a big problem: Legally he had to charge the detainees at the station within 12 hours or cut them loose. He’d found no guns, drugs or contraband at the roadblock or on any of the men fleeing cross-country. He’d found only pockets packed with rolls of $100 bills, roughly $300,000 total, but there’s no law against carrying suspicious amounts of cash.

The police hurried to dig up anything: arrest warrants, parole violations, even outstanding traffic tickets. But in 1957, that meant time-consuming phone calls and requests of other police departments to pore over files.

The wiseguys, not surprisingly, took great delight in being less than helpful. Family boss Genovese, for one, told Croswell, “I’ll only answer questions about how tall I am.”

Asked why they all happened to be gathered at Joe Barbara’s farmhouse on a meaningless Thursday in November, to a man they claimed it was a coincidence. They’d all just dropped by because Barbara had been feeling a little under the weather.

“You just dropped by . . . from Sicily?” Croswell replied to one.

After 12 hours, the mobsters all walked free.

“As a bust, Apalachin was something of a bust,” Reavill writes, adding that aside from a handful of minor parole violations, there were few legal consequences and nobody in attendance at Apalachin ever served time for participation in the summit itself.

A legally iffy attempt to try the mobsters on conspiracy to obstruct justice was based not on any malfeasance discussed at the house — but on their smirking claims they’d all dropped by unplanned. That was easily disproved by a $400 butcher’s bill for meats delivered to the farm for grilling that day, but an initial conviction of 20 gangsters carrying sentences of five years and fines of $10,000 apiece was quickly tossed on appeal.

The significance of Apalachin was not the roundup itself, but in how it changed the way Americans saw the mob.

Apalachin revealed that the Mafia was not merely a loose collection of rackets. The array of license plates alone at Apalachin showed it was indeed a shadowy national syndicate.

“No one had really ripped off the veil and seen that this was not just a couple of isolated hoods, but a vast national organization,” federal mob buster and Mayor Rudy Giuliani would say years later. “Apalachin gave the first demonstrative, solid evidence that this was a very large criminal conspiracy.”

Apalachin was a slap in the face to the FBI, which long insisted the Mafia was a myth. (In the 1950s, J. Edgar Hoover was preoccupied with hunting down communists. His New York field office devoted 400 agents to “subversives” and four to organized crime.) Robert F. Kennedy took up the fight both as counsel to Senate committees probing racketeering and with still greater tenacity in the ’60s as US attorney general.

From there, in the 1970s, the RICO statutes (short for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) allowed prosecutors to connect crimes upward through family hierarchies to even the most secretive, insulated Mafia dons.

And arguably it all began when the media ran wild with the Apalachin story, tickled by the what Reavill calls the “city mouse in the country” comedy of pinkie-ringed hoodlums on the run, stumbling over rocks and roots in a farming town on the banks of the Susquehanna River.

Headlines nationwide told of “Mafia Chieftans” getting “Run Out of Upstate New York Village.”

Overseas, even Paris Match magazine got in on the fun, with the story “Le Picnic des Gangsters.”