Free Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires by Selwyn Raab Page B

was possible,” he explained in A
Man of Honor.
    In addition to the garment industry, the five Mafia families used strong-arm tactics and their influence in unions to control and obtain kickbacks from stevedore companies on the Brooklyn waterfront, the Fulton Fish Market, the wholesale meat and produce markets in Manhattan and Brooklyn, construction and trucking companies, and hotels and restaurants.
    The Sicilian-Italian gangs even forced out Jewish racketeers from their pioneering roles in the $50-million-a-year kosher chicken business. New York’s large Jewish population and its Orthodox dietary rules guaranteed a steady demand for the interrelated poultry industry. The Jewish hoods were content with simple, old-fashioned protection tactics. They engaged in small shake-downs of frightened and defenseless businessmen trying to keep their companies and their bodies intact. Inspired by Tommy “Three-Finger Brown” Lucchese, the Mafia had more grandiose plans. Lucchese’s gunmen pushed aside their Jewish counterparts and, in what would become a classic model for industrial racketeering, established a cartel among live-chicken suppliers, wholesalers, and slaughtering companies. Lucchese formed a supposed trade group, the New York Live Poultry Chamber of Commerce, and through a combination of subtle intimidation and promises of ample profits, forced most kosher-chicken businesses to join. Prices were fixed to put an end to normal competition and each company was assigned a share of the market. In return, the company paid a fee depending on gross sales to the Mafia-front poultry association. Lucchese and his helpmates, of course, took a hefty cut for establishing the cartel and preventing new companies from competing in New York. The companies thatkicked back part of their profits to Lucchese simply passed along the “crime tax” through higher prices to their customers.
    Within the industries they controlled, from the garment center to the waterfront, the mafiosi profited further from illegal gambling and loan-sharking rings that fleeced wage earners.
    No competition was allowed by the five families. Jewish and Irish gangsters, who had run their own powerful Prohibition-era gangs, offered little resistance to the Mafia’s drive for absolute control. Even Meyer Lansky, the most influential Jewish gangster of his time in the 1930s and ‘40s, needed the approval of his Mafia partners for most of his projects. Lansky accompanied Luciano to Mafia conventions but was never allowed to sit in on discussions.
    Before the Mafia takeover, the undisputed Jewish criminal virtuoso of the 1920s was Arnold Rothstein. His omnibus activities included international bootlegging, labor racketeering, stock frauds, fencing stolen diamonds and bonds, narcotics trafficking, and gambling schemes.
    Rothstein’s legendary coup was engineering “the Black Sox Scandal,” by fixing the 1919 baseball World Series in which the heavily favored Chicago White Sox were defeated by the Cincinnati Reds. Known along Broadway as “the Brain” and “the Big Bankroll,” Rothstein was an unthreatening-looking figure, soft-spoken, and a spiffy dresser. His authority was enforced by an entourage of brutal henchman, and he tutored a crop of future Jewish and Italian underworld stars, including Lansky and Luciano. The charismatic Rothstein is believed to have been the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s gangster Meyer Wolfsheim in
The Great Gatsby.
    Whatever obstacles Rothstein might have created to the Mafia’s takeover of New York rackets were eliminated before Prohibition ended. On the night of November 4, 1928, he was found staggering on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan, shot in the stomach. Rothstein survived two days but, true to his own code
of omertà
, refused to identify the shooter or the motive. “I’m not talking to you,” a detective quoted him as saying from his hospital deathbed. “You stick to your trade. I’ll stick to mine.” He was