Island of the Damned Read Online Free PDF Page A

the prison on Welfare Island in late 1932 on charges of extortion, he was already a notorious gangster with a long criminal record, which included five arrests for murder, violent assault, burglary, extortion and racketeering none of which had interfered with his criminal career. Rao’s lawyers had managed to get all these charges dismissed, except for his 1932 conviction, for which he was serving a three year term. Rao’s imprisonment was a setback which surprised his cronies, who until then had regarded him as invincible. At the outset of his criminal career in the 1920s, Rao had started out as a humble foot soldier for Giovanni “Joe the Boss” Masseria, head of the Genovese family and the most powerful single figure at the time on New York’s Italian-American crime scene. Masseria, known for his close links to Al Capone in Chicago, had on his payroll a group of young upstart mobsters including Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, Albert “Mad Hatter” Anastasia, William Moretto, Joe Adonis and Frank Costello. Several years later, those cosa nostra young bloods were to revolutionise organised crime in America by creating a national “syndicate”, whereby all rackets were run as cartels along the lines of a corporate business, with executive directorship, control and financing undertaken by a ruling “commission” composed of the most senior and powerful capos - or heads - of five individual crime families.
    Long before the mafia adopted that business model however, Joe Masseria, the self-proclaimed capo di tutti capi (boss of all bosses) demanded absolute supremacy in the Italian-American underworld and would brook no rivals. It was his ruthless ambition which led to many of the bloody turf wars and massacres of the early 1930s, especially the brutal Castellammarese gang warfare between Giovanni Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano, so-called because Maranzano came from Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily. Maranzano took Masseria’s mantle of capo di tutti capi after arranging his rival’s execution at a restaurant in Coney Island in April 1931. But his reign was short lived. Salvatore Maranzano was himself shot and stabbed to death in his Manhattan office five months later by a team of Jewish assassins including Bugsy Siegel and Samuel “Red” Levine, recruited from the ranks of the Jewish Mafia by Meyer Lansky, the eminence grise behind such younger generation Italian mobsters as Lucky Luciano.
    While Rao learned to duck and dive between these warring factions, he eventually took over the administration of affairs of the infamous 107th Street mob where he controlled and financed the distribution of narcotics in Harlem and the Bronx, as well as arranging protection payments from gambling, bookkeeping, and prostitution rackets in the neighbourhoods. An acknowledged associate of Ciro “the Artichoke King” Terranova, he also became a silent partner in a numbers bank run by Joseph Valachi and his brother in law Joe “Stretch”, and found time to do business on the side with such hardened criminals as “Trigger” Mike Coppola, millionaire Frank Livorsi, who made a killing in black market sugar, and Charlie “Bullets” Albero, holder of the mob’s arrest record, with 27 arrests dating back to 1911. A close associate of the gang was Joe’s cousin Vincent Rao, a multi-millionaire owner of many New York apartment buildings. He too had many different arrests under his belt for grand larceny, murder and illegal possession of a revolver: like his cousin Joe, Vincent had been either acquitted or discharged on each count. Also on friendly terms with the 107th Street gangsters was Joe Rao’s brother in law Joe “Stretch” who had become chief enforcer for the “Italian Mob”, so named to distinguish its members from the Irish and Jewish gangsters who were especially prominent and successful in New York’s organised crime scene during the Prohibition era of the 1920s and early 1930s.
    The 107th Street mob has been