A one-of-a-kind federal dossier of famous Mafia figures – which was discovered abandoned on the seat of a Manhattan taxi nearly 20 years ago – sold for a whopping $10,980 on a New York City auction block yesterday.
The 3-inch thick, 843-page file stamped “Mafia” and “United States Treasury Department Bureau of Narcotics” was one of just 50 produced by the feds and is the only one believed to still be in existence.
The original file, which was copied and published as a book in 2007, was purchased by James Finkle, a retired undersheriff from Essex County, NJ, according to auction officials.
Inside the tome’s pages is a Who’s Who of major and minor Mafiosi from across the United States and Italy complied between 1957 and 1962.
Each entry reads like a bad guy baseball card, featuring a picture of a hoodlum and all his important stats, such as names of his underworld connections, his “legitimate businesses” and his criminal skills, such as killing and racketeering.
The file contains the names of gangland greats such as Joe Bonnano, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Carlo Gambino.
The “Mafia” folder was found by a passenger in a cab leaving Radio City Music Hall in the early 1990s.
“He basically just kept it to himself until contacting HarperCollins in 2006,” said Christina Geiger, director of Bonhams New York fine books & manuscripts.
The book version of the file contains many redacted sections. The original file sold yesterday is wholly unredacted.
The seller did not want to be identified, but is connected with the film and music industry in Hollywood.
“[The file] really gives the flavor of organized crime in the middle of the century,” Geiger said. “From a book collecting perspective, this is the first time that the Mafia is acknowledged by the federal government, and probably the first time that the word was used in that context because [J. Edgar ] Hoover was still denying the existence of organized crime not long before this was produced.”