Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone Read Online Free PDF Page B

membership had drastically dwindled, the remnants included a core of battle-seasoned roughnecks whose fealty a man with Kelly's business and political aspirations found worth preserving. On Seventh Avenue, close to the Broadway theater district, he set up new headquarters for them, naming it quaintly the New Englander Social and Dramatic Club. Seldom did a front so innocent mask exploits so nefarious. In vain the police, investigating an epidemic of knifings, bludgeonings and shootings, repeatedly raided the place. They discovered nothing more sinister than a few club members enjoying a game of cards or checkers. They arrested Capone three times during his salad days as a Five Pointer, once for disorderly conduct and twice on suspicion of homicide, but they could support none of these charges.
    What enhanced the usefulness of some Five Pointer veterans in Kelly's estimation were their affiliations with other gangs and gang leaders. The Sicilian Frank Uale, alias Yale, of Brooklyn, for example, had the respect of John Torrio and his James Street boys; he knew Ciro Terranova intimately. At twenty-five Yale was making his mark in the Brooklyn rackets, and before long he would dominate them. His basic specialty was murder contracts, and he made no bones about it. "I'm an undertaker," he said. But he believed in diversification. He owned a dine-and-dance dive, the Harvard Inn, on the Coney Island waterfront, and a strategic location it turned out to be when, with Prohibition, he became one of the first New York racketeers to distribute liquor from coastal rum-running fleets. Yale also built up a stable of hooligans for hire in labor-management disputes. They were available to both sides as either strikebreakers or union goons. Inspired perhaps by Terranova's success with artichokes, Yale proceeded to force upon Brooklyn tobacconists cigars of his own crude manufacture. His portrait adorned each box-jetblack hair parted far on the left, stolid, squarish face above a stiff white collar and black necktie-together with the price, "20¢, 3 for 50¢." The price bore so little relation to the quality of the product that a "Frankie Yale" came to mean in the borough slang a cheap bad smoke. Racehorses, prizefighters, nightclubs, a funeral parlorall fell within reach of Yale's grasp. But his single greatest source of profit and power was the Unione Siciliane.
    Conflicting accounts by police, press and its own officers have obscured the nature of the Unione Siciliane, or Italo-American National Union, as it was renamed in the twenties. Some accounts describe it as a secret criminal society with close ties to the Mafia, founded and run from its inception by gangsters; others, as a much maligned fraternal association. The Unione Siciliane did indeed originate as a lawful fraternal association, one of the first to advance the interests of Sicilian immigrants. The place was New York; the time, the late nineteenth century. For modest dues its members received life insurance and various social benefits. Branches sprang up wherever there was a sizable Sicilian community. Gradually the association developed enough strength to swing an occasional district election. By the twenties the Chicago area, which contained the biggest chapter, had 38 lodges and more than 40,000 members.
    Meanwhile, a cadre of New York hoodlums had begun to infiltrate and pervert the Unione Siciliane. Their leader, a kinsman by marriage of Ciro Terranova, was Ignazio Saietta, known as Lupo the Wolf, a pathological killer. Largely through Saietta's maneuvers, begun in New York and extended to branches in other cities, the asso ciation acquired a dual character: the one side open and respectable, doing good works among needy Sicilians; the other, hidden and malevolent, linked to the Mafia, dealing in white slavery, extortion, kidnaping, industrial and labor racketeering, bank robbery, murder. Invariably, the president was also a Mafioso. During a six-year period the U.S. Secret