On a hot summer day in the early 1980s, I followed two women I worked with in the communications office of the White House out to the South Lawn for a media opportunity with President Ronald Reagan. I was in my early twenties, and my role that day was routine and minor, ensuring I got the contact information for the media in attendance for potential follow-up.
One of the women, Sue, asked me to remind her where I was from. I answered, “Cherry Hill, New Jersey.”
“Isn’t that Mafia?” she asked.
Her question made sense. My hometown had been in the news lately because of a violent mob war. The long-standing Philadelphia–South Jersey “Docile Don,” Angelo Bruno, had been killed in front of his house and photographed, very dead, in the passenger seat of his car, his bloody mouth wide open in a mask of shock. This ignited a power struggle involving a Mafia old guard, “Young Turks,” pro-drug and anti-drug gangsters, and two New York City Mafia families with interests in the region. Bruno had been a savvy operator: Someone close to him told me that when the don wanted to meet with his associates, he would check into Cherry Hill Hospital complaining of chest pain, then get a room in the maternity ward near crying babies to hold sensitive meetings. All of this was to avoid surveillance.
My hometown had received particular attention because it was the headquarters of the “Cherry Hill Gambinos,” Giovanni (John), Giuseppe (Joe), and Rosario (Sal) Gambino, cousins of the late Don Carlo Gambino and partners with Bruno. Authorities alleged these Gambinos were under scrutiny because they were kingpins in the “Pizza Connection” heroin ring, where drugs were distributed through a network of pizza parlors. Put differently, Cherry Hill was considered by law enforcement to be the headquarters of heroin importation and distribution in the United States. This warranted a mention in a report prepared by Reagan’s President’s Commission on Organized Crime Report. Bruno’s legacy as an anti-drug boss was being questioned because while his men were said not to traffic in drugs, which was fabled to be “the rule” in the Mafia, at the very least, he had been in business with men who did. At most, he had been their partners. The Sopranos’ boss, Johnny Sack, once said, “For God’s sake, we bend more rules than the Catholic Church!”
The Gambinos’ headquarters was Valentino’s nightclub, down the street from my high school, a five-minute walk from my house. The brothers’ adjacent homes, essentially a compound, were close by. One of them was emblazoned with a stained glass G. Al Martino, who played the Frank Sinatra–like figure, Johnny Fontaine, in The Godfather, lived around the corner from me in a house with a horseshoe driveway and brick arches that mimicked Roman aqueducts. The Latin Casino Theater Restaurant, across the street from the Garden State Park Racetrack, had also been around the corner and had been Sinatra’s go-to venue in the Philadelphia area. Then there was the Sans Souci Restaurant, now long gone, which had been the supper club where Bruno had been known to induct or “make” members into his family.
In the 1980s, denizens of the area turned the local mob war into a spectator sport, betting on one faction or another, bragging about any attenuated personal link to “the boys” (“My aunt sat next to Skinny Joey’s barber in high school!”). You could be a solid citizen in my community and be acquainted with or related to someone from the racket world. My family had been in the region since the early 1900s, and we had and knew our share of characters going back to Prohibition. Most of us were law-abiding and boring. I was an undersized, straight-arrow kid focused on schoolwork, tennis, and student government. If I was a badass, then Mister Rogers was John Gotti.
When Sue, my boss, asked about my hometown, a few other colleagues perked up at the word “Mafia.” I defended Cherry Hill with the usual rhetoric about gangsters being a tiny fraction of the population.
“You couldn’t bring up Muhammad Ali? He lived in Cherry Hill,” I said. “So does the Flyers’ goalie Bernie Parent. Keith Richards stayed in Cherry Hill for a month in rehab.”
Nobody cared; they didn’t want to hear about the teachers, doctors, and lawyers; they wanted to hear about the new boss, the maniacal Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, Philip “Chicken Man” Testa (who had just been blown up by a nail bomb under his front porch, memorialized in a just-released Bruce Springsteen song), Philip “Crazy Phil” Leonetti, Anthony “Tony Bananas” Caponigro (recently found dead in the trunk of a car with $100 bills stuffed in various orifices after having been tortured for plotting against Bruno), Raymond “Long John” Martorano (a Cherry Hill resident, reportedly a methamphetamine kingpin), the pint-sized Harry “the Hunchback” Riccobene, who was making a play for the throne, and my late neighbor, the 750-pound Sylvan “Cherry Hill Fats” Scolnick who before his death had been driven around in the back of a mail truck, which provided him a bit more breathing room as he expanded like Violet Beauregard in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Then another woman in our White House retinue—I’ll call her Jane—said something that shocked me: “You know, the mob killed President Kennedy.” The others nodded as if this were a known fact. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard.
Before I had a chance to respond, President Reagan came out from the side doors of the Oval Office next to the Rose Garden and began his photo op with a visiting group. He was wearing a light, summer-weight suit. His cheeks were rosy, and his thick chestnut (not black) hair was swept back, showing grayer than conveyed on television.
When the session was done, I responded to my colleague’s JFK comment by asking Jane if she was serious. She said she was, as if everybody had known that the mob killed JFK.
“Have you ever met these guys?” I asked. “No,” the group said.
“Well, if you ever did, you wouldn’t be impressed with their capacity to kill a president and get away with it for decades.
“The real power,” I added, “is in that room twenty feet away from us.” The sun reflected off the thick bulletproof glass of the three rear windows of the Oval Office.
I understood where my colleagues’ notions about organized crime came from. Literature and cinema assign extraordinary talents to gangsters. A new generation of rappers has emerged with names like Capone, Corleone, Gambino, and Gotti somewhere in their monikers, conveying that “Mafia” means cool and sexily dangerous. Online discussion groups are replete with keyboard warriors angrily tagging those who cooperate with the government as “rats,” as if they are so in-the-mob that they, too, have been betrayed and must pursue la vendetta. Much of what we have come to learn about American organized crime is better than the truth. Crime novelist Mickey Spillane wrote in Kiss Me, Deadly:
“The bastards knew everything. What they didn’t know they could find out and when they did the blood ran. The Organization. The syndicate. The Mafia. It was filthy, rotten right through but the iron glove it wore was so heavy and so sharp it could work with incredible, terrible efficiency.”
I failed to persuade any of the White House aides of my position. They interpreted my skepticism of mob involvement in the JFK assassination as a twisted defense to frame gangsters in a more harmless light. The term “spin doctor” had just come into vogue to describe our line of work, and I suppose they thought I was plying my nascent trade. Nevertheless, the conversation has stayed with me for forty years because I believed that my colleagues’ lack of familiarity with organized crime informed their assessment of its role in the most notorious murder in modern history.
Over time, I saw that the reverse was also true: I would hear acquaintances talking about White House intrigue as if presidents could dispatch CIA ninjas to unleash massive conspiracies of violence under cover of darkness without detection. This, too, didn’t resemble what my experience had come to be in the ensuing years. While I have never been a big player in presidential politics, or organized crime, I had seen enough to believe that both could do bad things but were constrained by certain limitations, such as the laws of physics and probability.
Perhaps Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to voice an opinion about the Mafia. In 1890, New Orleans police chief David Hennessy was murdered. On his deathbed, he claimed that Italians were responsible, saying, “The Sicilians have done for me,” perhaps using an ethnic slur. There had been a conflict involving two local Italian crime clans, sometimes called the first Mafia families in the United States. Hennessy had been suspected of being more sympathetic to one group over the other. More than two hundred Italians were arrested without probable cause. Nine were tried for the Hennessy murder and either acquitted or cut loose after a mistrial. They were widely assumed to be Mafiosi. A vigilante party raided the prison and lynched eleven men. Roosevelt, who had been serving as a presidential appointee on the U.S. Civil Service Commission, voiced support for the killings, proclaiming them “a rather good thing.” It is considered the largest mass lynching in U.S. history and introduced Americans to organized crime using the exotic word “Mafia.” The New York Times referred to the murdered Italians as “sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins.”
Here, the American underworld ethic about not killing law enforcement officers began. It had nothing to do with morality and everything to do with consequences. After all, New Orleans was where the Mafia in the United States and the consequences of killing cops—in the form of public outrage and severe retaliation—first collided with the broader culture. It was no accident that this was a time when there was an uptick in immigration—there is a reference in the Congressional Record to one immigration wave as an “indigestible mass”—so the specter of dangerous foreigners was a ripe narrative.
“DO YOU THINK I’M A GANGSTER?”
I shared these anecdotes with my friend and editor Sean Desmond over breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., where FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had once dined daily. Sean thought it might be worth exploring the myths and realities associated with the mob and the White House, which this book is about. I told him that I had found comparatively little out there in the way of books focusing on organized crime and presidential politics and no recent compendium just on this subject.
Specifically, I wanted to know how mobsters used American leaders. How did presidents and their proxies use mobsters? How much of what we’ve heard about the mob and presidents is true? How much is the kind of lunacy that jams up discussions on Reddit and gives meaning to the lives of people wearing pajamas in their basements who believe they know how notorious events went down?
Because there have been connections between presidents and organized crime, were all exchanges equally corrupt? Were any justified? In some cases, gangsters provided services to help politicians advance. In other cases, they were brought aboard to help confront lethal enemies to national security and civil rights, the kind of threats that are often scoffed at these days by enlightened intellectuals. As we shall see, the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s partnership with racketeers during World War II was done because of national security, not personal or political enrichment. Something similar may be said of the Kennedy administration’s relentless, if feckless, attempts to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro. In these affairs, we can debate whether the instrument chosen was commensurate with the threats, but the threats from foreign and domestic saboteurs, not to mention racist hate groups, were real.
This is a study of organized crime in presidencies andpresidential pursuits. In this book, we will: learn about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s no-holds-barred campaign to rid the East Coast of Nazi U-boats and sabotage during World War II, and then find resources in Sicily to help plan for the Allied invasion; see how Harry Truman’s roots in a mobbed-up Kansas City political machine stayed with him throughout his career and how he helped racketeers despite his reputation for honesty and straight talk; trace how Joseph P. Kennedy co-opted the mob to help his son get elected and how the Kennedy brothers were running an assassination program involving mobsters to kill Cuba’s Castro; watch how Lyndon Johnson, fresh off his civil rights victory, saw it nearly evaporate when three civil rights workers vanished in Mississippi and the role the Mafia played in resolving the situation; witness Richard Nixon poach the labor movement from the Democrats by commuting Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa’s prison sentence and cozying up to his successor, events that led up to Hoffa’s infamous disappearance; see how Ronald Reagan’s career was recharged by his agent Lew Wasserman, whose show business conglomerate MCA used the services of organized crime to expand its empire; evaluate the long-standing business ties between New York racketeers and real estate developer Donald Trump; and be enlightened about the colorful connections of Joe Biden’s ancestors and how a mob-connected union heavy helped him out early in his career.
The modus operandi of politics and gangland is very nuanced and layered. In the absence of mob summits in the East Room, what are the networks and portals between gangland and the White House? And has the mob been a significant cog in the engine of capitalism anddemocracy and, if so, to what degree?
Understanding how layering and nuance work requires us to differentiate myth from reality. Mob financial kingpin Meyer Lansky denied ever saying, “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel” (a line made more famous by his Godfather II avatar Hyman Roth). In private records, he wrote, “To say more would be glorifying the same liars that say I said we are richer than U.S. Steel . . . Whom did I say it to?”
The very nature of both organized crime and politics is minimizing risk and maximizing gain. As consigliere Tom Hagen told Don Vito Corleone at his daughter’s wedding at the beginning of The Godfather, “Senator Cauly apologized for not coming personally. He said you’d understand.” This line rings true. It’s not easy to get to the truth when writing about people who lie a lot, but I will try, nevertheless.
This brings us to the question of how this book will define “organized crime,” “the mob,” “gangsters,” or “the rackets,” words I will use interchangeably. It’s an essential exercise because Gambino family boss Paul Castellano angrily asked chicken mogul Frank Perdue if he thought he was some gangster after Perdue requested Castellano’s services to ensure labor peace, precisely what the gangster delivered. Because Castellano was a gangster, he just didn’t think he was.
For this book, at the nucleus of “organized crime” is La Cosa Nostra (LCN), the once-powerful Italian American collection of criminal gangs accelerating activities such as illegal gambling, bootlegging, labor corruption, loan sharking, narcotics, extortion, and protection. When it comes to presidents and crime, much has been made of alleged criminal mischief associated with Bill and Hillary Clinton in Arkansas, not to mention Hunter Biden’s legal troubles. Still, these are not examplesof mob involvement as defined in this book. (Although Clinton’s brother Roger tried to get the president to pardon my townsman Rosario Gambino in exchange for a $50,000 Rolex. Bill wisely refused.)
There were rabbit holes I chose not to go down. For example, there is a theory that the Watergate scandal was partly motivated by a desire to cover up the existence of a prostitution ring allegedly operated by a Washington, D.C., mob figure. There has been a great deal of litigation surrounding this subject. I didn’t even want to come close to speculating about different figures, some of whom are living, when I had nothing dispositive of value to add.
Discussions of organized crime inevitably raise the question of ethnicity and criminality. Organized crime parallels the history of immigration combined with human nature, not ethnic or religious heritage per se. At America’s founding, much of the Scots Irish and English behavior toward the Native Americans—the swindles, the violence, the willful spreading of disease upon those who didn’t knuckleunder—could be characterized as organized crime. At the beginning of the twentieth century in New York, the Jewish gangs exceeded the power of the Italians. The Irish were in the mix, too. This changed quickly.
Italian Americans suffered from two misfortunes when it came to public opinion. First, the Italians had an organizational system that went back to Europe that was used as a template for navigating the indignities of immigration in the United States. Irish, Jewish, Asian, and Black racketeers had no commensurate cultural precedent. Today, other crime groups, primarily the Russians, are as lethal and sophisticated as LCN ever was but not as attractive to American popular culture. A ranking Justice Department official once explained (not for attribution) why there was such a focus on Italian organized crime: “The Mafia was small and handy. The feeling was the American people would buy it with its family relations and blood oaths a lot quicker than they could understand the complex syndicate. You must remember, we wanted to get public support behind the drive on crime.”
Second, Italians were tarnished by a media and entertainment culture that coincided with the rise of LCN and portrayed organized crime as being unique to Italians. Many believe that the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act was cutely named for the iconic mob boss character Rico Bandello in the 1931 film Little Caesar. There is something cooler about a crime boss name Rico than one named Sol or Colin. It is more sinister to portray a swarthy band of marauders from a specific alien land descending upon our clean nation than it is to recognize a diverse, loosely affiliated confederacy of capitalist miscreants—which is what the mob is. But look at what happens in online chat rooms when someone dares to suggest there were powerful non-Italian gangsters: The trolls are unleashed.
Nor were Italians helped by America’s history of anti-Catholic bias, including entire political parties established to oppose the greatly feared global reach of the Vatican. Nevertheless, “the Mafia” has become a catch-all metaphor for powerful, sinister forces we don’t understand, not to mention a dark brand of take-no-shit masculinity. While LCN never really protected the communities in which it operated in any meaningful way, they did provide psychic rewards with the notion that hardscrabble bandits were sticking it to America’s overlords.
In 1980, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated an Italian American population of twelve million. The number of LCN members and affiliates amounted to a few thousand. Still, powerful non-Italians emerged in organized crime, such as union boss Jimmy Hoffa (German Irish), mob venture capitalist Meyer Lansky (Jewish), and the Chicago Outfit’s political strategists Murray Humphreys (Welsh) and Gus Alex (Greek). One former federal rackets investigator lamented to me the gross under-estimation of these personalities and fetishization of the Italian American mob. Still, LCN is at the core of how organized crime willbe covered in this book.
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Excerpted from Wiseguys and the White House, by Eric Dezenhall. Copyright 2025. Published by Harper. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
