"I Never Sold Any Bibles"

MANNERS & MORALS

(See Cover)

The scarred and swarming tenements along Harlem's East 108th Street have changed little since Gambler Frank Costello was a boy. The towers of the Triborough Bridge now float in the sky just beyond their chimneys, and a snare-drum roll of traffic drifts up from the modern East River Drive. Negroes and Puerto Ricans choke the slums to west and north. But the old neighborhood is still Italian. Its sidewalk garbage cans (each with its cover chained to prevent theft), its great, voracious rats, its smells, its endless noise, are the same.

Jostling armies of liquid-eyed children still play in its filthy, glass-strewn alleys, its dark hallways, and in vacant lots, where the refuse of generations is packed solid, a foot higher than the sidewalks. Its old men are sad. The young men who haunt its streets by night--callow bravoes with oiled black hair, sharp suits and the melancholy curse of pimples--loiter in knots with expressionless faces, just as they did when Frank Costello had a gun in his pocket and was one of them.

Then, as now, East 108th Street was a hard place to live. It was harder to leave. The palaces of Manhattan's power and wealth rose up only a few blocks to the south, but to the poor of Italian Harlem, they were as remote and incredible as the palaces of India. Frank Costello escaped to live in them by a process as devious and dangerous as an escape from Devil's Island. He became a rumrunner, a slot-machine king, a gambler and intimate of killers, a political fixer--and a man of riches and influence.

He was not the only boy from a slum who got rich in the rackets: in his day the U.S. had become as much a land of opportunity for the graduate of Dannemora as for the graduate of Dartmouth. But Frank Costello had the brains, luck and jungle caution to stay rich--rich, alive and free as air--while Al Capone went raving to his grave, while bullets cut down Dutch Schultz and Dion O'Banion, while Lepke Buchalter burned in the electric chair, while Lucky Luciano went off to exile and a hundred minor hoodlums rotted in prison.

Last week, greying, hoarse-voiced, 58-year-old Frank Costello was fast becoming a figure of U.S. legend. Millions of newspaper readers considered him a kind of master criminal, shadowy as a ghost and cunning as Satan, who ruled a vast, mysterious and malevolent underworld and laughed lazily at the law.

Rumor clung to him like filings to a magnet. Wise guys whispered knowingly that he had ordered the Beverly Hills murder of his old friend Bugsy Siegel, the shooting of Los Angeles Hoodlum Mickey Cohen and dozens of other cases of violence. In three months he had been charged with influencing politics in New York, Kansas City, Los Angeles and New Orleans. Crime commissions speculated feverishly that he owned gambling houses and nightclubs from Florida to California, controlled race wires across the nation, ran the baleful Unione Siciliana (i.e., the U.S. Mafia) and financed everything from narcotics smuggling to jewel theft.

Much of this avalanche of accusation was politicians' talk or crime reporters' romance. Most working-level law enforcers (including FBI men) scoff at the idea of one big crime "syndicate" presided over by one overlord; they know that rackets 1949 style are a loose arrangement of agreements, territories, cuts and splits. A gritty residue of the charges was probably perfectly true. Frank Costello made no bones about the fact that he played Tammany politics, kept in touch with such nefarious "old friends" as Longy Zwillman, Joe Adonis and Socks Lanza, and had an "interest" in a rich Louisiana gambling empire.

But amid all the hue & cry against him, nobody for 34 years had been able to arrest him and make charges stick; several ambitious prosecutors had tried and were still trying. While the public assumed that Frank Costello everywhere flouted the law, he was busy staying inside it, or stepping outside only when he was sure that local law enforcers were in his pocket. He abhorred violence; it did not pay. Of his critics, he asked: "What do they think I am? Superman?" He liked to describe himself as a "legitimate businessman" and pointed to his own habits and mode of life as evidence.

In many ways, he was one of Manhattan's quietest and more conservative citizens. He was a sedate husband, who had been married for 35 years to a plump, pleasant, onetime show girl named Loretta ("Bobby") Geigerman Costello: he seldom stayed out later than 10 o'clock. The Costellos were childless, lived unostentatiously in a seven-room, $3,600-a-year apartment on well-to-do Central Park West, employed one servant, a Negro maid who had been with them for 15 years. They also owned a twelve-room, $34,000 summer home at Sands Point, N.Y., had a small peach orchard on the place which Costello pruned with zeal and precision.

After years of life in the upper brackets, Costello had learned many of the mannerisms of the Man of Distinction. He was a hero to many a Manhattan headwaiter and doorman. His clothes bore a faint look of Broadway and Madison Square Garden, but they were cut well and worn with assurance. He still spoke with some of the accents of the Upper East Side, and suffered embarrassment at occasional mispronunciations. But he made a point of smoking English Ovals, and liked to reflect that he owned half a million dollars' worth of Wall Street property--more than most Yalemen.

He had no enemies in the underworld, and he employed no bodyguards; his regular trips to Florida and to Hot Springs, Ark. (for golf and the baths) were invariably peaceful. Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan was convinced "he's not committing any crimes in New York. If he was, I'd slap him down so fast it'd make his head swim." The FBI watched him sharply, but was convinced that he did not break any of the federal statutes under their jurisdiction. What he might have been doing to state statutes across the country was none of the FBI's concern.

In reaching this comfortable estate, Frank Costello had also achieved a peculiar but significant place in U.S. society. The rackets, like college football, the labor movement, and the care and breeding of Christmas trees, had inevitably become big business. The brain had replaced the muscle, the injunction had become more potent than the Tommy gun, and surviving warriors of prohibition upheld the status quo. Frank Costello, "legitimate businessman," dramatically typified the change.

Up from Craps. The twisting road which led Frank Costello to a tower apartment on Central Park West began in Cosenza, Italy, where, in 1891, he was born Francesco Castiglia, sixth child of a debt-burdened farmer. He was brought to New York when he was four; his father opened a hole-in-the-wall grocery on East 108th Street, and he was exposed early.to the neighborhood heroes: the torpedoes who worked for Giro Terranova, red-handed boss of the Unione Siciliana in Harlem and The Bronx.

They fired his imagination. He quit school when he was eleven to sell newspapers and run a kids' crap game--a project which meant paying off the Irish cop on the beat. He soon graduated to sterner enterprise. When he was 17, he was charged with assault and robbery, but the charge was dismissed. In 1912, when he was 21, he was arrested for robbing a woman of $1,600 on the street and again the charge was dropped. But in 1915, Gunman Francesco Castiglia, alias Frank Saverio, alias Frank Stello, was jailed and convicted of illegal possession of a pistol.

Old court records describe the dark little drama--how the defendant ran from two suspicious policemen and threw his pistol into a lot, how he was caught, dragged back, and how the weapon was found. They tell of his pleas for mercy, made at first in Italian through a court interpreter, and finally in English, and they repeat the words of a forgotten judge:

"I have got it right from his neighbors that he has the reputation of being a gunman and in this particular case he ... had a very beautiful weapon and was . . . prepared to do the work of a gunman. He was charged on two other occasions with doing the work of a gunman and, somehow or other, got out of it. Now I commit him to the penitentiary for one year . . ."

He served ten months; it was the only time he ever went to prison.

Kewpies & Creditors. Frank Costello, businessman extraordinary, was born after that. The tale of his ventures and triumphs emerged only in jerky scenes, badly lighted and often confused. But each time he appeared, momentarily in the light, Frank Costello looked bigger, sharper, more assured--and richer.

He ran Harlem crap games. He was a partner in something called the Horowitz Novelty Co. which dealt in Kewpie dolls, razor blades and punchboards. It went bankrupt, left its creditors holding the sack, was reborn as the Dainties Products Co.--and boomed. He put his money into real estate, built apartments and five-story walkups in Upper Manhattan and The Bronx, and with his investments hit another jackpot.

In 1923, with speakeasies running in a thousand Manhattan basements, Frank Costello threw his bankroll into the rum trade. It was an enormous and complex business which involved the systematic bribery of thousands of policemen, the timed dispatching of speedboats and trucks, the direction of sales and bookkeeping staffs, the printing of fake labels, the operation of cutting plants and the purchase of fortunes in whisky. To the tough hoodlums who were its soldiers, it was also extremely hazardous.

Nobody shot at Frank Costello, and he fired no shots himself; he had long since quit packing a gun. He was a big shot from the start--a fixer, conniver, ship operator and financier--who did his work in an office at 405 Lexington Avenue, made business trips to Montreal to buy liquor from Canadian and European exporters, took enormous risks and made enormous profits. He also kept himself so shadowy and unobtrusive a figure that when U.S. Attorney Emory Buckner made a desperate but unsuccessful effort to smash the liquor racket, Costello was erroneously charged with being an accomplice rather than a competitor of Rum King Big Bill Dwyer.

But he was recognized and respected among the barons of the underworld. He became an intimate of Arnold Rothstein, the great gambler and criminal banker; he gained the esteem and affection of Tammany Swagman Jimmy Hines. When Al Capone and the other big men of gangland met in the famous Atlantic City peace conference of 1929, Frank Costello took a leading part in calling for cartels in the 'rackets instead of armed competition--a role which gained him the title of "The Prime Minister of the Underworld."

Kastel & Costello. Long before prohibition was over Rumrunner Costello began transferring his interest and rum profits to safer fields. In 1928 he formed a lasting partnership with Dandy Phil Kastel, a dapper little enterpriser who had whetted 'his wits as manager of a Montreal restaurant and operator of a Manhattan bucket shop. Costello and Kastel formed the Tru-Mint Novelty Corp. and gave the enthusiastic New York public a chance to play slot machines. He told Kastel: "If a guy named Hershey could make all that dough on a 5-c- candy bar, maybe there's an angle here."

Costello also "laid off" bets with big bookies and kept a finger in real estate. After repeal, with financial backing from William Helis, the "Golden Greek" (who demanded 20,000 cases of choice Scotch for security), Costello and Kastel bought control of Britain's Whiteley Distillery, producers of House of Lords and King's Ransom Scotch. The board of directors agreed to pay Costello -L-5,000 ($24,400) a year simply for "frequenting first-class hotels and restaurants and asking to be supplied with the company's brands." But the slot machines were Costello's gold mine.

Between 1928 and 1934 the Tru-Mint Corp. and its subsidiaries operated as many as 5,000 machines. In some cases they were equipped with little ladders to help the kiddies plunk in their nickels. The machines were protected from the police through an injunction against seizure. They were protected from rival hoodlums by a private police force, whose efficiency is reflected by this report from the company files:

Date 12-4-33

Machine No. 295632

1544 Second Avenue

Beer Garden

Broken into between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. Took machine, $18 from register, wines and cigars.

Found by Andy in cellar of 246 East 80th Street. This is hangout of gang. Recovered, Dec. 4.

The gross profits of the slots, calculated at $600 per machine a year, brought in an annual profit of $3,000,000. But in 1934. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia ordered the machines seized, personally banged up dozens of them with a sledge hammer while photographers recorded his prowess. He also called fellow Italian and longtime admirer Frank Costello a bum, a tinhorn gambler, and a punk. That was the end of Tru-Mint and of Costello's regard for the Little Flower.

Helpful Huey. It was not the end of the slot-machine king. Costello had cultivated Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, a man he suspected of having liberal views on certain types of financial matters. The friendship paid off. Within a few months, Huey had granted Costello and Kastel a concession to operate their slots in Louisiana, and a new river of nickels began jingling into their coffers.

Costello once described the deal to a federal grand jury:

"I got Philip Kastel, which is my associate, to go down there and work the thing out. He went down and he incorporated . . . [Huey Long] wanted to get himself about 25 to 30 thousand dollars per year to donate toward some fund . . . There was supposed to be a tax to the state and that tax was going to some relief of some kind . . . That was his proposal, but it never happened because he died." How did Costello happen to be singled out for so profitable a deal? "Maybe I was the lucky one," he dryly told the jury.

The partners bedded down happily with Huey's heirs and remained in business. It was an ideal arrangement for Frank Costello, who had put up only $15,000; he stayed in New York City and just let the money roll in. One year, they grossed $1,297,580. The Louisiana venture was still an ideal arrangement last week even though slot machines are illegal in Louisiana and Reform Mayor Chep Morrison had chased them out of New Orleans.

Dandy Phil, who lives in a brick mansion in the city, devoted himself to managing the lush dining room and the gaming tables of the white colonial Beverly Club, a Costello enterprise which had risen in 1945 in wide-open suburban Jefferson Parish.

"Mr. Schedule." With his business embarrassments thus detached and distant from his home town, Frank Costello lived as openly as his more respectable neighbors along apartment-lined Central Park. He followed an almost unvarying routine ("I go places so regular they call me Mr. Schedule").

At 10 a.m., with commuter-like regularity, he walked into the big, opulent, mirrored barbershop of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for a shave, a manicure, and, if need be, a trim. Afterwards he seated himself on a leather chair near the doors and received those who wished to chat, make quick touches, or offer him investment opportunities.

He usually ate lunch at the Waldorf's Norse Grill, just across the hall, was always greeted effusively by the hatcheck girl ($2 tip), the headwaiter ($3 tip) and the lucky man who served his table. Almost every afternoon he wandered off by himself to see a "pictcha," a lonely figure who sought out movies he hadn't seen before, on Broadway or in the suburbs, without caring whether it was a cowboy film, a thriller, a musical, or good or bad. At dusk, he went to the dimly lighted cocktail lounge of the Madison Hotel, had a maximum of three Scotch & sodas, and made himself "available" again to anybody wanting to talk business.

He professed to be a happy burgher and well content with his lot. But at other times he seemed like a restless man. He said: "We all got just a certain number of hours to live ... I don't understand why people waste time." Frank Costello, who had once lusted for wealth, lusted for respectability. He was steadily thwarted. He had lived by stealth and secrecy, had avoided newsmen like the plague, but his power and influence had brought him torrents of publicity--all of it bad.

The storm broke on him just before a municipal election in August 1943. District Attorney Hogan, who had tapped Costello's telephone, reported the conversation which had ensued when one Thomas Aurelio called Costello the morning after Aurelio had been nominated for New York's supreme court:

Aurelio: Good morning, Francesco, how are you, and thanks for everything.

Costello: Congratulations. It went over perfect. When I tell you something is in the bag, you can rest assured.

Aurelio: . . . Right now I want to assure you of my loyalty for all you have done. It's undying.

After that Frank Costello was poison in the big city. This year when he gave a $100-a-plate charity dinner for the Salvation Army at the Copacabana, eight judges, including Aurelio, a Congressman and all the top Tammany politicos turned up in dutiful droves. But the newspaper headlines that bloomed largely and blackly the next day had the same, exultant horror that might have been expected if he had spent the night plotting to cart off the City Hall.

"Like a Rabbit." Frank Costello took the lesson to heart. Every man has his own secret portrait of himself, and Costello fancies himself a man who keeps his word, sticks by his friends ("I know a lot of people who are not exactly legitimate. But that don't mean I'm in bed with 'em, does it?") and does countless good deeds. After all, wasn't he supporting a boys' town in Italy, didn't he quietly give away thousands to charity every year, including some run by papers which damned him, and didn't he give a $5,000 bonus apiece to each of his nephews who went into the Army?

One day last week, nervously cascading a stream of quarters from one hand to the other, he talked a little about himself. "Right now I'm cleaner than 99% of New Yorkers," he said. "Now I don't want you should get the wrong impression--I never sold any Bibles." But he insisted that he obeyed the law. "There they all are wit' their shotguns waiting for me to come out of a hole like a rabbit. You think I could get away with anything? It's ridiculous."

He discussed the charges that crime commissions and politicians around the U.S. continually made. "I tell them if they want me, let me know and I'll come at my own expense. I got nothing to hide." Of the narcotic trade: "I'd rather die than sell dope." He talked of some of the impulses which big money had given him. Back in the 19205 he had revisited his birthplace in Italy and handed out stacks of lire to everyone. "What was a hundred lire--just three lousy bucks." On fishing trips to Louisiana's bayou country, he took along about $25 worth of "cheap candy," tossed it to Cajun children on the riverbanks--"I sure feel for them kids."

He was even philosophical about the publicity which had become his cross. "I'm like Coca-Cola. There are lots of drinks as good as Coca-Cola. Pepsi-Cola is a good drink. But Pepsi-Cola never got the advertising Coca-Cola got. I'm not Pepsi-Cola, I'm Coca-Cola because I got so much advertising."

But Frank Costello was a realist. He no longer mentioned the names of friends among "better people," and tried to avoid public introductions which would embarrass them. The U.S., which had drunk Frank Costello's whisky, played his slot machines and looked the other way when his money was slipped to public officials, didn't think he was a very pleasant fellow. It never would.

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