-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Arizona Project
Michael Wendland©1977
ISBN 0-8362-0728-9
Sheed Andrews and McMeel, Inc.
6700 Squibb Rd.
Misson Kansas 66202
276 pps. - first edition - out-of-print
New revised edition - available amazon.com
Paperback, 304pp.
ISBN: 0945165021
Blue Sky Press, Incorporated
June 1988
=====
10
Mafia West
There has always been something about Arizona that has attracted the outlaw.
Bank robbers, claim jumpers, hired gunfighters, and such famous badmen as the
Hole in the Wall Gang and Butch Cassidy are synonymous with the Old West and
Arizona's history. In the early days, it was the state's proximity to Mexico
and its wide-open, rugged terrain that attracted the old-style hoodlums. The
state had room to hide in and a foreign border to flee to should legal
pursuit be too intense.
In the twentieth century, crime and criminals are more sophisticated. Yet
Arizona, which somehow has remained a step or two behind the rest of the
country, remains equally appealing to the criminal. Mexico is no longer a
sanctuary: today it is almost like a business partner for the American
hoodlum, a place where the raw material—opium—comes from for the mob's main
businessnarcotics. And the state's wide-open spaces, while still plentiful,
are more aesthetic than protective. Instead, Arizona's chief appeal to the
criminal lies in the cumulative effect of the outlaw's heritage, the
attitudes and actions accepted through centuries of apathy. For the criminal,
Arizona is a good place to do business. It is a state where the outlaw has
always flourished. Indeed, even today, in such tourist attractions as
Tombstone and Old Tucson, the outlaw is celebrated with twice-daily mock
shoot-outs by actors and stunt men.
The crudeness is not as blatant as it was in the old days. Phoenix and Tucson
both abound in cultural activities. There are excellent local theatres,
symphony orchestras, art museums. But just beneath the surface, much more
obvious than in most Eastern cities, is a macho-like respect for the
maverick, the man who makes his own rules, lives by his own law.
The Old West is not very old in Arizona.
It was that element of Arizona society that the IRE team would investigate
next. What the reporters would find was that, like the old-fashioned outlaw
who drifted West from back East, Arizona's new hoodlums were immigrants from
elsewhere. And, like the narcotics pouring across the Arizona border, the
state was being inundated with them.
Wendland and Drehsler returned from Mexico to find a surprising number of new
team members. The suite was crowded and the telephones so busy that it was
often all but impossible to find working space. Doug Kramer, a young reporter
from the Elyria Chronicle in Elyria, Ohio, had arrived for a couple of weeks'
work. Jerry Uhrhammer, a forty- three-year-old, mild-mannered writer for the E
ugene Register-Guard in Oregon, was there for an indefinite stay. So were
Steven Wick and David Freed from the Colorado Springs Sun. Ed Rooney, a
grizzled old police reporter from the Chicago Daily News, had given up ten
days of his vacation to come work on the Arizona project. He also paid his
own expenses.
Ross Becker, a tall, gangly, bearded young reporter who joined the project in
mid-November, was an anomaly among team members. He had next to no
substantive journalism experience and, instead of being recruited, talked his
way onto the team by simply pestering Greene. But he would be a full-time
member, with the project until its completion.
At twenty-four, Becker had been working out of a trailer on the
642-square-mile Zuni Indian reservation in New Mexico, covering Indian news
for the Gallup (New Mexico) Independent when he heard about the IRE team and
decided that he wanted to enlist. He tracked down Greene and began calling
the IRE office almost daily, begging for a chance. But Greene was concerned
about Becker's background. The kid had just over a year's experience in
newspapering, almost all of it with small papers in remote parts of the
Southwest. The Arizona project, Greene felt, would be over Becker's head. But
instead of flat-out telling the persistent young reporter to get lost, Greene
kept stalling him, hoping he'd get the hint. But Becker continued calling
each day. Finally, after Greene began refusing his calls, Becker got up one
morning at five-thirty, borrowed a girlfriend's car, and spent six hours on
the road, reaching Phoenix shortly before noon. From the lobby of the Adams,
he phoned the IRE office. Marge Cashel, the secretary, routinely told him
Greene was tied up in a meeting and would call Becker back.
"The hell he will," said Becker. "I'm downstairs and coming up to see him."
They met in Greene's connecting bedroom to the IRE suite. Becker told Greene
he realized his background was less than complete but vowed to make up for it
by enthusiasm. He said he'd do anything, even the dirty work and errand
running, he just wanted in. Each time Greene started to protest, Becker cut
him short. It was a chance of a lifetime, he told Greene, and he wouldn't
rest until Greene let him join. It took fifteen minutes of face-to-face
badgering, but finally Greene, the tough, veteran investigative reporter from
Long Island, gave in to the young, inexperienced cub from the Indian
reservation.
"You did it, kid," said Greene, slapping Becker on the back. "You wore me
down. You're in."
Becker virtually floated back to New Mexico. In mid-November, after quitting
his job with the Independent, selling his own car, and taking out a $500 bank
loan, he arrived at the Adams for good. He had no idea what he'd do after the
project ended, and all he could do was hope that the $800 he had to live on
would last. But he was in.
When Becker volunteered to do the dirty work, he didn't realize that he would
be taken so literally. The day Wendland and Drehsler returned from the
border, they ran into a stranger on the third floor of the Adams parking
garage, sorting through a huge pile of garbage that had been dumped on the
floor. "Hey, there's this kid down in the garage with a pile of trash," an
incredulous Drehsler told the office as they came through the door.
"Yeah, that's Becker," said John Rawlinson. "He's a new reporter. He didn't
have anything to do, so Greene sent him out to steal Bob Goldwater's trash
and see what goodies it contained."
A few minutes later, Becker, smelling of coffee grounds, came in waving
Goldwater's bill for $300 from the Phoenix Country Club. All it established
was that Goldwater liked to play golf and eat well. Still, it went in the
Goldwater file.
Meanwhile, Greene was swamped in paperwork. He spent eighteen-hour days
behind his comer desk reading the reporters' memos, marking them for various
files, and spotting holes that needed to be filled. Each afternoon, he would
slowly nod off to sleep. One day he was rudely awakened when his hair caught
fire from a cigarette he had forgotten to extinguish before resting his head
in his right hand.
The Buddha was the closest thing the reporters had seen to a human computer.
His ability to read long, complicated financial statements and memoranda and
then file them away in his memory for near total recall weeks later was
amazing. He was like a master juggler, keeping the various story projects
going in a dozen different directions, while always looking around for new
angles. If he had one fault, the reporters felt, it was that he sometimes
worked too closely with law enforcement officials.
Public officials, of course, have always been major news sources. Owing to
the similarities between their jobs, police and reporters often overlap on
certain investigations. Confidential trade-offs sometimes occur, e.g., police
provide information they have developed in exchange for some of a reporter's.
It is seldom discussed, but every reporter has done it at various times. In
most cases, the cooperation works to everyone's benefit. But on sensitive
matters, it can become a major moral dilemma for a newsman. A reporter is
only as good as his word, and many times a news source will talk only with
the promise of anonymity. Often, an investigative reporter's sources are the
very persons police are trying to make a case on. So trading information with
the police must be weighed carefully.
And Greene had been giving a lot of it away.
One night in mid-November, Arizona Attorney General Bruce Babbitt came into
the IRE office with a district attorney from Alaska. From conversations with
Greene, Babbitt knew that the IRE team had documented several ties to Alaska
by members of the Licavoli and Bonanno organized crime families in Tucson.
Among other things, IRE had established Arizona mob interests in Alaskan
prostitution and narcotics trafficking. Babbitt suggested that Greene share
the team's intelligence with the Alaskan prosecutor.
Nina Bondarook, one of the ASU student workers, was asked by Greene to Xerox
the entire file on the Alaska-Arizona connection for the Alaskan prosecutor.
She was going over the files when she saw that one of the team's sources was
named. John Rawlinson, who had worked on the Alaskan end of the
investigation, was sitting nearby. Bondarook called him over and told him
what Greene intended to do.
"You're shitting me," he said. Rawlinson had dealt with the source on a
confidential basis. He couldn't believe that Greene would simply turn it over
to Alaskan authorities without clearing it first. Rather than confronting
Greene in front of Babbitt and the Alaskan prosecutor, Rawlinson put through
a call to his Alaskan source, who allowed him to reveal his identity.
The incident disturbed most of the reporters. Greene had been dealing closely
with local and state police officials all along. Indeed, his relationships
had saved reporters days of work and provided major breaks in their
investigation. But along with the police assistance, each reporter had
developed his own sources, some of whom would be extremely upset to know that
their names were being bandied about in front of lawmen. While their memos
seldom identified sensitive sources by name (a special code was used
consisting of the initial of the reporter's last name followed by the letter
S for source and an identifying number), the source's real name often could
be easily divined by someone familiar with the subject. And Greene knew the
names of many confidential sources since he usually assigned the reporter to
contact the source in the first place.
There was another annoying problem: the Arizona Republic Wendland's Henny
Youngman source, the ex-real-estate salesman and private eye who had earned
his name by spouting off a dozen news leads in one-liner fashion, kept
insisting that somebody at the Republic was out to sabotage the IRE
investigation.
"You still don't believe me," said the source one afternoon shortly after
Wendland's return from Mexico.
Wendland shook his head. "Give me something specific, something I can check
out. So far, all you've done is claim the Republic is double-dealing us."
"I wish I could be more specific. But they're suckering you guys. They are
not about to print what you come up with."
Republic city editor Bob Early and reporter John Winters, the staffer
assigned to work on the team, certainly gave no indication of that, Wendland
thought. Indeed, Early had been up in the office several times late at night
and, after going through some of the files, had had high praise for the
team's work, even to the point of saying how eager he was to see it in print.
"Well, all I can tell you is that I'd be damn careful of what I let them
see," said Henny. "I mean, if certain people are tipped off to what you guys
are looking into, they can cover certain things up before you can get to
them, right? I mean look at Harry Rosenzweig. He's a very big man in this
state, close to the Goldwaters and all that. And he's nervous as hell about
what you guys got on Bob Goldwater and that Herb Applegate."
"Go on."
"That's all I know. Something about a killing up in Las Vegas.
Wendland tensed. The Applegate investigation was one of the team's most
closely guarded secrets. "What are you talking about?" he asked, trying to sou
nd bored and irritated.
"Something about a girlfriend of Applegate's and a private eye that got
killed. I don't know anything more about it except that Rosenzweig's been
told that you guys got the goods on Applegate and Goldwater."
"I don't know what the hell you're talking about. Who told Rosenzweig what?"
"The Republic. The Republic tipped him. He's worried about a bunch of
personal stuff coming out about Goldwater's company, you know, sex orgies and
all that."
"Where the hell are you hearing all this? You're not making sense."
The source shrugged. "I told you, I can't say how I know this. I just do,
that's all. Okay, so maybe I'm all wet about Rosenzweig. But you've got to
believe me about the Republic."
Henny Youngman couldn't provide any more details. After he left, Wendland
wondered. The guy was persistent as hell. Why? Was he a plant, sent to get
the various reporters on the team suspicious of each other and thus divert
their energies, or was he for real, just a local guy who had seen how corrupt
the state was and wanted to get even with those who had screwed him? Wendland
didn't know. While he still met with the source once or twice a week, he had
not yet gotten anything concrete from him. Or had he?
That night, Wendland and Koziol went down to the hotel bar for a couple of
drinks before turning in. Wendland told him what the informant had said about
Rosenzweig's being tipped off about the Hobo Joe's investigation. They went
over all the bases. Koziol and Teuscher had asked a lot of questions of a lot
of people. Rosenzweig could just as easily have learned of the reporters'
investigation from someone other than the Republic.
But Koziol, too, had questions about the Republic's way of handling certain
stories. One of his first assignments after arriving in Phoenix had been to
interview Jack Karie, a former Republic reporter. It was Karie who, in the
early fifties, discovered extortionist and ex-pimp Willie Bioff living in
Phoenix under an assumed name and socializing with the city's elite. But when
he wrote a story which exposed Bioff, the Republic killed it. The reason:
Bioff had gone to his friend, Harry Rosenzweig, who in turn used his clout
with Gene Pulliam, the Republic's owner. It was because of this favor that
Bioff made a $5,000 campaign contribution to Barry Goldwater's first senate
campaign, directed by Rosenzweig. The favor did Bioff little good. In 1955,
he was blown apart in a bomb blast.
Koziol found Karie, who had quit newspapering in 1963, in a makeshift
gymnasium in Scottsdale where the ex-reporter taught boxing to youngsters for
the suburb's recreation department. A solidly built, white-haired man of
about five feet, eight inches, Karie was familiar with the IRE team and was
glad to help out. Koziol asked him to talk about the Willie Bioff story.
"Sure, I remember it well. A guy came up to me one day at the bar in the
Arizona Club and told me that this guy we all knew as Bill Nelson was really
this hood named Bioff," Karie recalled. "I went right out and started nosing
around. It didn't take much to verify. So I shot a couple of pictures of his
house and wrote the story. It was a damn good one, too. So I'm waiting a
couple of days for the story to come out. This one afternoon I stop by a
liquor store and who do I run into but this Nelson-Bioff guy. He's acting
like a real smart-ass. He tells me he knows all about the story I wrote and
says he's taken care of it, that it won't run. Then he threatens me, says he
has a lot of powerful friends and I'd better stay off his ass or else. Well,
I really got pissed off. I went storming into the office. I couldn't figure
out how Bioff knew about the story. Sure enough, the editors are real
wishy-washy when I start bitching. I finally am told that it was killed on
orders of old man Pulliam."
Karie said he went out and had a few drinks. Then he remembered seeing
Rosenzweig in the office the day before, talking to Gene Pulliam. "See, you
got to understand, Rosenzwieg ran that newspaper, probably still does." But
Karie still thought he had a good story. And rather than let it die, he went
to Tucson and called syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler. "I gave the whole
thing to Pegler and he used it," Karie bragged.
The ex-reporter had lots of criticism for the Republic. "They tried to break
me after that. They took me off the street, tried to keep me away from my
sources. I finally got so fed up that I left. You had to fight your own
people."
As Koziol left, Karie remembered one thing. "Hey, you know what my last
assignment was before I got out?"
Koziol shook his head.
"I was the guy who broke in Don Bolles."
Gene Pulliam, the Republic's crusty old publisher, was dead in 1976, though
the paper was still controlled by editors who shared his friendships and
philosophy. Koziol and Wendland had each come into contact with many of Don
Bolles's closest friends. As they sipped their drinks in the Adams bar, they
wondered about the Republic's integrity. For everyone who knew Bolles had
said he was a disillusioned man in the months before his death. He, like
Karie, had often complained about wishy-washy editors. A certain amount of
griping is standard in the newspaper business, a traditional cityroom
cynicism that is as much a part of newspapering as printer's ink.
But wherever the IRE reporters went, they heard few good things about the Repu
blic.
Despite the pledges of cooperation from Early and Winters, there had been a
few incidents. Most recently, IRE members had been refused access to news
clippings in the Republic library by managing editor Harold Milks.
Wendland finished his drink. "Shit, we're worrying about shadows. We've got
enough work to do. Let's not let this get us down."
Koziol agreed. They said good night and went up to their rooms.
In mid-November, after miles of "deep 'n dirty" traveling about the state,
Tom Renner finally showed up. The team's mystery man turned out to be a
short, slightly balding fellow with an ulcer and an engaging smile. Renner
had been on the road full-time since the project began, and he was beat. But
he was also very pleased. He had brought in piles of information that spelled
out the current activities of Joe Bonanno and Pete Licavoli, Sr. It showed
that the mob was slowly but surely moving in on the Southwest, building a
tightly run operation rivaling the power of the long-established New York mob.
Actually, the Mafia had been in Arizona for thirty years, though Renner's
files noted that it had only just begun to consolidate its strength. Joe
Bonanno had come to Tucson in 1943, for the health of his eldest son,
Salvatore, known as Bill, who had an ear mastoid. The best treatment for the
boy was to sit in the sun and let the ear drain, said Bonanno's New York
doctors. So Bonanno came west and settled into a comfortable house on
Tucson's East Elm Street. The next year, he was joined by an old friend,
Detroit mobster Pete Licavoli, Sr., who purchased a sprawling ranch outside
of town.
This westward migration did not put an end to either mobster's crime
activities. Bonanno continued to run his New York family. Licavoli, taking
advantage of the then-emerging gambling in Las Vegas, set up his own gambling
wire for horse and dog results.
Bonanno, of course, found that his reputation had preceded him. But in the
Western tradition, he was received by the Tucson citizenry openly and with no
prejudice. Soon Bonanno was parlaying some of the profits from his New York
earnings into large land holdings in Arizona, appearing at the right parties,
keeping a low profile, and donating time and money to his church. Just how
well established he had become was made evident in 1954 when federal
officials tried to strip away his U.S. citizenship. At his deportation
hearing, Bonanno lassoed a passel of Arizona pioneer family members as
character witnesses, among them U.S. Representative Harold "Porque" Patten,
Roman Catholic Bishop Francis J. Green of the Tucson diocese, and Evo
DeConcini, a former state supreme court judge and a man of enormous political
influence whose son, Dennis, was elected a U.S. senator in Arizona's 1976
elections.
His influence continued to grow. Augustus "Gus" Battaglia, a man without a
criminal record but an old friend of Bonanno's from the New York days, moved
to Arizona in the mid-fifties, building a giant cotton farm midway between
Tucson and Phoenix and soon becoming a powerful figure in state politics,
famous for hosting lavish parties. Renner obtained a guest list from one of
those parties, held in 1959. Among those attending were the Arizona governor,
the state's attorney general, the Pima County sheriff, two of the state's
congressmen, the heads of most of Arizona's major regulatory agencies, and
Joe Bonanno.
Bonanno, however, couldn't leave well enough alone. While forming new
alliances and planting roots in Arizona, he was still very much active in the
administration of the New York mob. In the early sixties, he began a series
of moves aimed at consolidating his interests back east. His big mistake was
in calling for the assassination of mob chieftain Carlo Gambino. Gambino's
well-organized family nipped the plan in the bud, snatching Bonanno off a New
York street during one of his frequent visits home. He was to be killed. But
because the Bonanno kidnapping was drawing an incredible amount of newspaper
coverage and police heat, the ten-member mob ruling council stepped in. If
Bonanno were eliminated, a major gang war was sure to follow. And Bonanno was
a native Mafia son, one of the original founders of the American Cosa Nostra.
He was not simply a cocky street soldier or an informer. His life would be
spared, but only if he would agree to "retire" back to Arizona and stay out
of the New York mob's affairs.
>From 1965 to the mid- 1970s, Bonanno did just that. But then a number of
lesser mob figures, realizing the enormous potential in Arizona, began moving
into the state, carving off territories in prostitution, gambling, and
loan-sharking. They began fighting among themselves. Sitting in Tucson,
Bonanno knew opportunity when he saw it. He had promised the Mafia council to
stay away from New York, a promise he had pretty much kept. But it was a
different matter in his new home state. He began meeting with the other
newcomers, expanding his influence and cementing working relationships.
Arizona was a jewel in the desert and Bonanno began polishing it. But with
Arizona came other areas. Colorado, with a growing population and no real
organized mob, was another plum waiting to be picked. Using the alias "Mr.
Veccio," Bonanno made at least two trips to Colorado Springs in 1974 for
organizational meetings with his new associates. Since his two sons, Bill and
Joe Junior, were already established in Southern California, the old man
began moving in there, too. Federal officials noted that after each Bonanno
visit, his sons would fan out in meetings with local mobsters, passing the
information they had received from the father. Carmine Galenti, who in the
fall of 1976 was vying for control of the East Coast mob after the death of
Bonanno's old nemesis Gambino, flew to California for a meeting with Bonanno,
apparently giving East Coast approval to an organizing drive in the West.
Joe Junior, the old man's second son, had not escaped legal difficulties
himself. In fact, a 1972 case against young Joe was probably one of the most
bizarre examples of Arizona justice encountered by the IRE reporters. It was
a conspiracy case. Joe Junior and a friend, Arthur Grande, Jr., were
convicted in the Phoenix courtroom of U.S. District Judge Walter E. Craig of
taking part in a murderfor-hire conspiracy. Five codefendants had previously
pled guilty before Bonanno and his friend found a similar fate at the hands
of a jury whose members unanimously agreed that the old mobster's son had
tried to hire a hit man to kill a Phoenix hotel owner he was not getting
along with.
The unusual aspect of the case came on June 19, some six weeks after the
conviction, when Judge Craig suddenly reversed the jury's verdict. In a
seventy-minute, early-afternoon hearing, the judge declared that he thought
the jury had convicted because it believed Bonanno and Grande to be guilty of
a shakedown attempt, which had come out in trial testimony, but not of the
murder conspiracy.
It is highly unusual for a judge to toss out a jury verdict, especially more
than a month after the verdict has been handed down. It is likewise virtually
unprecedented for a judge to do so without first polling the jury as to why
they convicted. But that was precisely what Judge Craig did. He simply
assumed that he knew what the jury's thought process had been without talking
to its members. Then he arbitrarily freed the defendants.
IRE reporters decided to go back and talk to some of the principals in the
case. John Rawlinson, the Tucson Daily Star reporter, interviewed jury member
Robert W. Clark. Four years later Clark was still furious about the judge's
unexplained reversal. He had been so angry at the time that he had written
letters of complaint to the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Attorney General Richard
Kleindienst, and Senator Barry Goldwater, charging that Craig's conduct
during the trial had been "anything but impartial."
"Just what do you mean by that?" Rawlinson asked.
"His reaction to various witnesses and their testimony left little doubt as
to what he thought of them," said Clark. "When witnesses hostile to the
defendants were on the stand, Craig would get these incredulous looks on his
face. I remember he kept making noises, shaking his head and looking in
disbelief every time somebody said something against Bonanno."
Clark said he had sat on a number of juries before and had never seen a judge
behave like that.
Rawlinson had an exact copy of the judge's words in overturning the decision.
Said the judge: "I think what may have happened to the jury in this case was
that they, at least the majority of them, felt that they could not sustain a
conviction on Count Eight [conspiring to hire a hit man] and that they
ultimately compromised because they did not like what possibly has transpired
in the two defendants getting away with $5,000 [from the shakedown]."
Rawlinson asked whether the judge might have been right.
"No way. There was no such action on the part of the jury. We reached a very
honest and unanimous decision. We believed that the evidence proved them
guilty, and that judge's speculating as to how and why we reached the verdict
was just not true."
The foreman of the jury was Jerry Boyd, a Phoenix gas station owner.
Rawlinson asked him the reaction to Craig's sudden reversal of their guilty
verdict. "We were flabbergasted," said Boyd. "I mean it was a real insult to
us. How could he know what we were thinking? The whole jury was absolutely
convinced of their guilt." Boyd said he had been told by several jurors that
they had received threatening phone calls during the trial and that one of
the male jurors had been followed home after court one day.
"Then something real peculiar happened," said Boyd. "The morning after we
found the Bonanno kid guilty, I come into my gas station and I find that
someone had shot a large hole in the front window. Now I've been in the same
location for twenty years and never had vandalism problems. But that's not
all. That very same morning, Valona Hughes—she was on the same jury with
me—she comes into my station. Now normally, she'd just stay in the car while
I filled the car. Well, fortunately, this time she gets out to go in for a
pack of cigarettes or something. Anyway, seconds after she gets out of her
car, this huge lumber truck comes careening into the station and smashes into
her car. Well, all hell breaks loose. The driver of the truck says he's hurt
and an ambulance suddenly shows up. Then the police come. A couple of days
later, I find out from the cops that the truck was stolen and they were never
able to find the driver or the ambulance."
Boyd said he reported the incident to the FBI but that nothing ever happened.
"I'll tell you this much," he told Rawlinson. "Those things were much too
coincidental. They scared hell out of me. I figured they must have had
something to do with the trial."
Ann Bowen was the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted young Bonanno. A
small, intense woman, she too was incensed by Craig's handling of the case.
It was almost as if the judge deliberately attempted to scuttle the trial
himself, she felt.
When she questioned witnesses, said Ms. Bowen, the judge buried his face in
his hands. Often, at key moments in the middle of tough questioning, he would
openly laugh. She remembered him mimicking one of her witnesses in a falsetto
voice and ridiculing her by gesturing and rolling his eyes throughout her
presentation. Like the jurors, Ms. Bowen tried to do something about Craig's
actions. She wrote a lengthy memorandum, citing numerous examples of his
judicial indiscretion. She asked her superiors to appeal the case. It never
was.
The same day that Judge Craig announced his decision to toss out the
jury's guilty verdict, another interesting development occurred in Tucson, a
two-hour drive south from Phoenix. IRE had come up with some solid
information from federal sources that sharply illustrated old man Bonanno's
concern for his son's legal problems. The gov-ernment had learned that a week
or so after his son's conviction, the old man, who had showed up as a
spectator each day of his son's trial, told a close associate that he needed
to come up with a large sum of money to "get my son off the hook." Bonanno
said he needed cash that he would not have to account for later on and that
it would have to come from someone else. Exactly what, if anything, was
worked out
that day was unclear. But on June 16, Bonanno's longtime friend Pete
Licavoli, Sr., deposited $25,000 in his personal account at Southern Arizona
Bank in Tucson. And early on the morning of June 19, Licavoli went to a
branch office of the bank and tried to write himself a check for $25,000
cash. But the bank didn't have that much money on hand so early in the
morning. Licavoli then went to the main office downtown, where he was
described by federal agents as nervous, sweating, and obviously in a hurry.
He was given the $25,000 as requested, in $100 bills. Nobody knew where he
went after rushing out of the bank.
Just after noon that day, Craig overturned the conviction against Joe
Bonanno, Jr. In his previous interviews with IRE reporters, Craig denied any
knowledge of the Tucson transactions.
That was in 1972. And in 1976, the old man, at seventy-two and still in
excellent health, continued to be a very busy man. Renner had gone to
Bonanno's new home in North Tucson one morning in November to watch the old
man for himself. About ten, Bonanno stepped out the back door of his
unpretentious brick house, situated on a well-landscaped, curving suburban
street with a breathtaking view of Mount Lemon. His silver hair gleamed in
the sun as Bonanno called over his Doberman, Greasy, who prowled the front
and back yards during the night. Bonanno put the dog in the house and got
into his brand-new silver Cadillac Fleetwood.
Renner was familiar with the routine. His sources told him that Bonanno would
drive a half-dozen blocks to the Lucky Wishbone, a small, neat' restaurant
which specialized in takeout fried chicken. Bonanno seldom went into the
restaurant. Instead, he carefully closed himself in a telephone booth out
front, fished a handful of quarters from his pocket, and dropped one into the
slot. Renner's sources had watched him make over a dozen calls. That was Joe
Bonanno's office.
The reporter's law enforcement sources had told him that the phone booth
routine occurred each day, though the old man changed booths every couple of
weeks. Exactly what Bonanno, said was usually known only to him and the
person he was talking to. He spoke only in Sicilian. Renner looked at police
surveillance reports indicating that Bonanno entertained a number of visitors
in his home. Some were prominent and came in through the front door, as
evangelist Billy Graham had a couple of years before. Others, however, were
strictly backdoor visitors. Federal agents once watched Bonanno's longtime
bodyguard, Peter Notaro, meet four well-known mobsters at Tucson's
International Airport, place them in the back of a station wagon, cover them
up with carpeting, and then drive them to Bonanno's house, where they quickly
unloaded around the back.
That Joseph Bonanno—whose New York crime family designed the infamous "French
Connection" for Turkish heroin—was now involved with Mexican drug dealers was
well established by lawmen. Among the pilgrims to Bonanno's was Hector Mar
Wong, a Chinese-born drug wholesaler who operated one of Mexico's biggest
heroin smuggling rings. And on March 1, 1976, Bonanno was observed flying in
a private plant to Culiacan, Mexico's main drug processing center, where he
was met by Victor Savela, the brother of one of Mexico's top heroin
suppliers. From the Culiacan airport, Savela drove Bonanno to the Camino Real
Hotel in nearby Mazatlan, where he met with Demetri Alonzo, of Bogota,
Colombia, a major South American cocaine merchant. After a four-hour meeting,
Bonanno returned to Tucson.
Bonanno had to be careful with Peter "Horseface" Licavoli, his old hoodlum
friend from Detroit who had come to Arizona the year after he did. It did not
look well for the two to be seen together too often. Their carefully nurtured
images of "retired businessmen" would crumble were their real associations
out in the open.
But Licavoli was still very much in business as well. At seventyfour,
suffering from cancer, Licavoli was in big trouble with the law in the fall
of 1976. He was scheduled to go on trial in December on federal charges of
receiving a stolen painting and offering to sell it to an undercover FBI
agent from the art gallery he ran from his eightyacre Grace Ranch. Licavoli
was later found guilty and sentenced to serve eighteen months in prison. But
stolen paintings weren't Licavoli's only criminal activity. IRE reporters had
obtained wiretaps and tape recordings which implicated Licavoli in the sale
of stolen Israeli machine guns and counterfeit money.
The first tape was made two days after Christmas in 1973 by an undercover
informant of the U.S. Treasury's Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Division.
Licavoli met the ATF informant, who was wearirIg a hidden body bug, near the
American Airlines counter at Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport and took him
outside to an automobile. Inside the car, the gray-haired, ruddy-faced
Licavoli produced nine forged twenty-dollar bills and a single fifty-dollar
note. The bills were excellent counterfeits.
"I can get you up to twenty million dollars' worth of these bills," boasted
Licavoli, who believed the informant was an organized crime figure from the
East. Licavoli would sell the counterfeit bills for twenty-five percent of
their face value. The aging mobster also had other merchandise for sale, in
particular, some 200 Uzzi machine guns, manufactured in Israel, available
with or without silencers.
"Open the glove compartment," Licavoli instructed the informant.
Inside, there was a .22 caliber Baretta, equipped with an elaborate silencer,
which Licavoli said was representative of the quality of the merchandise he
was selling. It was Licavoli's own personal weapon, he said. The meeting
ended with Licavoli promising to locate three telephone booths in Phoenix,
which he would use to communicate with the informant as they conducted future
negotiations.
Another meeting was held two weeks later. Again the informant was wired as
Licavoli took him to Applegate's Olde English Pub in Phoenix, owned by
restaurateur and longtime Licavoli pal Herb Applegate. Inside, there was a
long line of luncheon customers. Licavoli was immediately recognized by the
hostess and was ushered ahead of the waiting diners to a secluded table.
During lunch, Licavoli again spoke proudly of his ability to provide the
stolen machine guns, though the conversation was frequently interrupted as
some twenty different persons-lawyers and prominent Phoenix
businessmen-recognized the hoodlum and came over to his table to exchange
greetings. Licavoli seemed proud of the attention and boasted to the
informant about how well connected he was. He even said he had a "twist" on
Senator Barry Goldwater through his association with Herb Applegate, the
business partner of the senator's brother.
The tapes underscored facts already uncovered by IRE reporters Koziol and
Teuscher in their investigation of Applegate's chain of Hobo Joe's
restaurants, information which established $2,500-a-month payoffs to Licavoli.
In 1969, a widely traveled Arizona contractor, a man who served on the loan
clearance board of a Phoenix bank, told the FBI that he "had taken nine
million dollars to the Bank of Tokyo and deposited it for Licavoli. IRE
reporters had documented Licavoli's financial interest in an Arizona race
track, millions of dollars in secret real estate holdings, and hidden
ownership in a score of restaurants and parking lots. He was a very wealthy
man.
And he had done it all. In the thirties, Licavoli had been the head of
Detroit's so-called Down River Gang, a powerful branch of the Motor City's
old Purple Gang. He had been a suspect in a half-dozen murders, including the
1930 killing of Detroit radio newsman Gerald Buckley, and had served prison
time for everything from bribing a Customs official to income tax evasion.
But perhaps the most bizarre thing that Licavoli ever tried took place in the
fifties. That's when he attempted to purchase an entire town.
Tom Renner had found a Tucson attorney, who confirmed the incident. The
lawyer said he was approached by Martin Fenster, a known front man for
Licavoli, who wanted him to form several corporations which would hide
Licavoli's involvement. Then the corporations would completely buy the little
border town of Lukeville.
Lukeville wasn't ever much of a town, situated on sixty-seven acres of barren
desert land about fifty miles southwest of Tucson. Permanent residents had
never totaled more than sixty, and there was nothing to the real estate but a
cantina, a gas station, a trailer court, and a small motel. It was an
extremely isolated spot where water had to be trucked in and normal amenities
like electricity and telephones cost dearly. But Licavoli wanted it.
The one thing Lukeville had going for it was its location. It was the only
border crossing along a barren 250-mile stretch of desert between Nogales on
the east and San Luis Rio Colorado on the west. More than half a million
tourists annually crossed at Lukeville, most of them headed for Mexico's
Puerto Penasco and the rich sport fishing waters of Cholla Bay. As such,
Lukeville was a natural crossing point for drug smugglers as well.
The Tucson attorney said he had refused to go along with the secret maneuver
to buy the town up for Licavoli and didn't know what the man had tried next.
Further research led Renner to one Stan Tanner, who quietly took title to the
town in 1962. Tanner had been a friend of Licavoli's since the mid- 1940s.
Contacted by IRE reporters, he said he had no idea that his pal Licavoli was
ever interested in Lukeville. "Isn't that something?" he said with a smile.
In 1967, public records showed, Valley National Bank in Phoenix foreclosed on
a loan to Tanner, and the town was sold to a man named Alfred Gay, a wealthy
ex-con who owned an Alaskan flying service.
Meanwhile, reporters learned about other Licavoli associates, suspected by
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as up-and-coming smugglers who
operated a prostitute, narcotics, and stolen goods ring between Mexico and
Anchorage, Alaska. Interviews with law enforcement and underworld sources
indicated that the old man was passing on the family business to the
associates, who were frequently seen all over the Southwest in the company of
known organized crime figures.
The team had established that the Mafia was very much present in Arizona,
prospering and expanding like a conglomerate.
Over Thanksgiving, the office fell into a slump. The reporters were
overwhelmed with work. As Phoenix went about decorating its downtown streets
with papier-mache Santa Clauses wearing Mexican sombreros, the reporters
missed their families back East. Then Nina Bondarook, the ASU student
volunteer, burst in Saturday afternoon with twenty-five dollars' worth of
garland and tinsel and Christmas candy canes that she strung up all across
the office. It was a bit too gaudy, but it cheered everyone up.
No sooner did one reporter leave than he was replaced by new recruits. Dave
Overton, a tall, bearded newsman from KGUN-TV in Tucson, arrived the first
week of December. So did David Offer, a thirty-five-year-old investigative
specialist from the Milwaukee Journal. Both would be with the project through
the end of January, when most of the reporting was expected to be wrapped up.
There was one more permanent addition. He was Dick Cady, a slightly built man
in his early thirties who came from the Indianapolis Star. Cady would be
Greene's assistant, assigned to play vulture with the files, to pick them
apart for accuracy and to detail where more work needed to be done. He knew
his job. Back home, Cady was head of the three-man investigative team whose
probe into police corruption won a 197 5 Pulitzer Prize. Along the way,
however, Cady and another Star reporter had been indicted in a police setup
aimed at discrediting the newspaper's investigation. The charges of
attempting to bribe a police officer were dismissed after Cady's team
continued its work, unintimidated by the pressure. Besides the Pulitzer,
journalism's most coveted award, the Star team also won the Drew Pearson
Award for Investigative Reporting.
It took Cady more than three weeks of sixteen-hour-a-day reading just to get
through the massive files already compiled by the team. When he did so, he
was asked what he thought.
"Fantastic," he grinned.
His opinion was shared by Tony Ansolia, a managing editor of Newsday, who
flew out in early December for a week's reading. Ansolia was one of the most
skilled editors in the business. He would spend the entire month of February
in Phoenix, editing the dozens of stories which would finally be written.
Originally, Greene had expected no more than eight to ten stories to emerge
from the project. The whole investigation was not expected to stretch beyond
the end of December. Now, it looked like the earliest the team could finish
would be the end of February. Ansolia, Cady, and Greene saw over fifty
individual news stories that could be written from the files.
Bob Weaver, a short, quiet, forty-one-year-old reporter from the San Jose
Mercury in California spent two weeks in early December working on the team.
His paper paid for one week, the other week was his vacation. He took the bus
to Phoenix to save expenses and, despite chronic high blood pressure and a
slight heart condition, Weaver worked fifteen-hour-a-day stints, mostly in
the office, where he did eye-straining record research into the giant Goldmar
and Del Webb Corporations. This labor was bound to catch up with him. One
night, ten days after his arrival, he began to feel dizzy. He figured it was
because he had been neglecting the long walks prescribed by his doctor back
in San Jose. About eight o'clock, he left the office and headed for the
street. He was sure he'd feel better if he could walk around in the fresh
air. He had gotten no further than the downstairs lobby when the dizziness,
now accompanied by chest pains, overcame him. He made it to the house phone
and called upstairs. Jerry Uhrhammer rushed down to help his stricken
colleague, whose face had turned a pasty white.
Weaver thought he was having a heart attack. The other reporters put him in
his room and tried to locate a doctor. The Adams had no house physician, and
a Phoenix medical referral service had no one on call. Meanwhile, Weaver
thought he was feeling better. He tried to sit up in bed, but the chest pains
returned again. He attempted to hide the discomfort, but his appearance
convinced his friends that he needed immediate medical attention. Wendland
rushed downstairs to get a car out of the hotel garage while Dick Cady,
Uhrhammer, and Carol Jackson, a student volunteer, helped an unsteady Weaver
out of his room and into the elevator. Wendland picked the group up in front
of the hotel and drove to St. Luke's Hospital, which specializes in coronary
care.
It took about two hours to run a battery of tests. Fortunately, Weaver had
not suffered a heart attack. His problem was fatigue, brought on by overwork
and stress, which had caused an imbalance in the various medicines he was
taking for the high blood pressure. The emergency room doctor suggested a
couple of days' rest and a return to his normal exercise. "The main thing is
to take it easy," he said as
Weaver was dressing to go. "You're exhausted. Get some rest."
The next day, Weaver was back in the office at noon. When his coworkers
protested, he said he had slept in an extra two hours and was just fine. He
had several more days to stay in Phoenix, and he didn't plan to spend them in
bed. There was work to be done.
While Renner was documenting the activities of the Bonanno and Licavoli crime
families, John Rawlinson and Norm Udevitz headed northwest to the
Arizona-California border and the bustling desert spa of Lake Havasu City, an
entirely new town built in 1963 on 14,000 acres of rocky and and Mohave
County wilderness by the giant McCulloch Corp. It had grown to quite a
resort, permanently occupied by nearly 15,000 'snowbirds," or retired
Midwesterners glad to exchange their frigid winters back home for Arizona's
fabled climate, and thousands of tourists and would-be residents who came
to partake of the community's golf courses, recreational amenities, and a
tour of the London Bridge, which McCulloch purchased in the late sixties and
had shipped to the desert as a promotion gimmick.
The reporters spent several days in Lake Havasu City, returning to Phoenix
with still another example of the mob's presence in the state. For what they
found was, in the words of Joe Chapin, an investigator for the Mohave County
sheriffs department, "almost a complete transplant of the Rochester, New
York, chapter of the Mafia."
"We're just a small sheriff's office," Chapin insisted. "We don't have the
manpower or the equipment to know what the hell these people are up to. But
we know they are here."
Mohave County was one of Arizona's least populated counties. All but 10,000
of its 25,000 residents lived in the brand-new city of Lake Havasu. It was an
unincorporated city, with no police force of its own. The only lawmen for
miles around came from the office of county sheriff David Rathbone, who
talked with the steel-jawed cowboy twang made famous in the old Western
movies.
"I'm no good on them eye-talian names," Rathbone drawled. "But we sure got us
a lot of Mafia types around here."
One of the county's most prosperous businessmen was Edward Eugene Frederico,
Jr., a darkly handsome forty-two-year-old who, among other things, owned the
area's only asphalt and concrete plants, which held million-dollar
subcontracts with the Lake Havasu Irrigation and Drainage District to build
city streets. Frederico, who moved west in 1973, was a native of Rochester.
In Lake Havasu, he was the head of the hundred-member Italian-American
Antidefamation League.
"Just because I'm Italian and grew up with the Mafia back in Rochester and a
lot of my friends are mobsters doesn't mean that I am," he told Rawlinson and
Udevitz.
Frederico apparently did not hold membership in the mob against his friends.
Among the incorporators, officers, and key employees of his two firms,
Rawlinson and Udevitz found Quinto Leo Polidori, an enforcer for the
Rochester mob convicted in 1975 of beating a delinquent loan-shark victim,
and Joseph Vincent Sciolino, a soldier for the Rochester family convicted
with Polidori in the 1975 incident as well as on a federal charge of dealing
in stolen checks.
Two other once-prominent Rochester natives had also moved to the booming new
Arizona resort. William Hamill, Rochester's former deputy police commissioner
came out about the same time as Frederico. He left the city's police
department under the cloud of a grand jury indictment accusing him of leaking
evidence in a major gambling case against a notorious Rochester mobster.
Hamill's background came to light when he applied for a job with the Mohave
County sheriff's reserve. He did not get it.
The Rochester fire department was also represented in Lake Havasu. Joseph
Nalore, formerly the fire chief of Rochester, emigrated to Arizona and tried
to get a job with the Lake Havasu fire department. He, too, was turned down
because of a grand jury indictment. Nalore was accused of arson, i.e., of
showing certain Rochester mobsters how to make fires appear as accidents. He
was also accused of torching seven Rochester buildings for insurance proceeds.
And the reporters had learned of a dozen more Mafiosi who kept popping up in
town to soak up a little sun, visit old friends, and play some golf. It was
an interesting place. The Rochester mob was loyal to Joe Bonanno. And its
growing presence in Lake Havasu illustrated another phase in Bonanno's move
to consolidate the Southwest into a single organized crime family.
pps. 167-186
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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