Word: gambler
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...outraged at seeing Gambler Frank Costello's picture on the Nov. 28 cover . . . The only place for his picture is in the police files...
...scarred and swarming tenements along Harlem's East 108th Street have changed little since Gambler Frank Costello was a boy. The towers of the Triborough Bridge now float in the sky just beyond their chimneys, and a snare-drum roll of traffic drifts up from the modern East River Drive. Negroes and Puerto Ricans choke the slums to west and north. But the old neighborhood is still Italian. Its sidewalk garbage cans (each with its cover chained to prevent theft), its great, voracious rats, its smells, its endless noise, are the same...
...poor of Italian Harlem, they were as remote and incredible as the palaces of India. Frank Costello escaped to live in them by a process as devious and dangerous as an escape from Devil's Island. He became a rumrunner, a slot-machine king, a gambler and intimate of killers, a political fixer-and a man of riches and influence...
...recognized and respected among the barons of the underworld. He became an intimate of Arnold Rothstein, the great gambler and criminal banker; he gained the esteem and affection of Tammany Swagman Jimmy Hines. When Al Capone and the other big men of gangland met in the famous Atlantic City peace conference of 1929, Frank Costello took a leading part in calling for cartels in the 'rackets instead of armed competition-a role which gained him the title of "The Prime Minister of the Underworld...
...brought in an annual profit of $3,000,000. But in 1934. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia ordered the machines seized, personally banged up dozens of them with a sledge hammer while photographers recorded his prowess. He also called fellow Italian and longtime admirer Frank Costello a bum, a tinhorn gambler, and a punk. That was the end of Tru-Mint and of Costello's regard for the Little Flower...