Word: slots
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...York syndicate. Headquarters: Manhattan. The command: Frank Costello and his No. 1 man, swart Joe Doto, alias Joe Adonis. Its specialties: gambling casinos, slot machines, crap games...
Gambling requires no fleets of trucks, cutting and bottling plants, secret garages, machine-gun battles with Coast Guard cutters or dumb cops on motorcycles. Gambling can be a pretty peaceful business and a man can keep the overhead down. Slot machines, punchboards, policy and numbers games, gambling casinos and bookmaking-the gangsters tried them all, made easy money on them all. Their customers range from the penny numbers players of the big-city slums to the big-money set who keep their change in century notes...
...take is staggering. An average slot machine, the committee estimated, clears $50 a week; a mobster who has placed 200 slots, a comparatively modest effort, can assure himself a gross of $5.000 a week. One of the eight big policy wheels in the Negro section of Chicago netted $1,000,000 a year. A gambling casino in New Jersey cleared $255,271 in a good year, one in Florida, $205,000. Tony Giz-zo, a mobster in Kansas City, admitted that his little newsstand handbook netted him more than $100,000 a year. In all, the committee estimated "conservatively...
...domain of Costello's partner, "Dandy Phil" Kastel, and of Carlos ("The Little Man'') Marcello, a squat Sicilian who controls the racing wire for Chicago's Capone syndicate. Marcello is a partner with Kastel and Costello in the Beverly Club, owns a jukebox company, slot machines and a fleet of shrimping vessels. Last year he publicly pistol-whipped a man in the heart of New Orleans, but not a single witness to the event has yet turned...
...committee probed other payoffs that had reached to the state level. In California, the committee said, representatives of Attorney General Fred Howser had set out to organize protection for all slot-machine and punchboard operations through the whole state. In Missouri, the state government "narrowly escaped falling under the control of gangsters" in 1948, the committee declared. Former State Attorney General Roy McKittrick testified that the late Charlie Binaggio offered him $50,000 to withdraw his rival candidacy to now-Governor Forrest Smith, told him: "I have to have a governor." After election, Binaggio was seen so often leaving Governor...