History Spotlight, 11/13

The American Mafia in the 1950’s was in a time of crisis.  The tumult from the end of WWII affected all aspects of the country, including criminals.  Put the pressures from crusaders like Robert Kennedy and Estes Kafauver and the Mob was facing pressures that most other industries didn’t have to.  This caused the Mafia to split into two factions, the Liberal Faction and the Conservative Faction.   The Liberal Faction wasn’t exactly promoting socialized medicine and daycare centers; they wanted to deal drugs (to increase money coming in) and kill many more people than they were.   They were mostly the young Turks of the mob.  The Conservatives, the old bulls, wanted to keep things as they were.  No drugs and the same amount of killing.  If you’ve got two groups, one of whom wants more killing and the other who wants the same amount of killing, who do you think is going to get the upper hand? 

At about that time the only witness to one of Vito Genovese’s murders wound up mysteriously dead in his prison cell and Vito came back to the US from Sicily.  Vito called a meeting of all the big mob guys from all over the country at the estate of his friend Joe “Joe the Barber” Barara in the tiny upstate New York town of Apalachin.  Among the topics to be discussed was loansharking, narcotics trafficking, gambling, and not killing each other quite so much. 

New York State Trooper Edgar D. Crosswell had been keeping Joe the Barber’s estate in the back of his head.  The year before, noted Mafioso Carmine Galante had been stopped coming from Barbara’s estate and that made Crosswell take a little drive by every now and then.  Just casual, you know.  When Crosswell heard that Barbara’s son had been reserving large blocks of rooms at local hotels and then heard that a huge supply of meat had been delivered to Barbar’s estate he drove by a little more frequently.  When hundreds of luxury cars with out of state plates descended on the town Crosswell and his men started taking down license plate numbers.  When the results of these plates came back, they started setting up roadblocks. 

In the end, 58 mobsters were captured, including Vito Genovese.  All of them claimed to be visiting Joseph Barbara because he was sick.   Poor Joe the Barber had never wanted the meeting to be held at his estate.  The meeting had been there the previous year and he knew that Crosswell had been keeping an eye on the place.  One of the unexpected outcomes of the raid was demonstrating to the American public (and the FBI) that there was something called the Mafia.

History Spotlight 11/10

One of History’s greatest dummies is born on this day in 1565.  Have you ever known someone who is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is?  He doesn’t know when to shut up and the rest of the room is staring uncomfortably at their shoes while he digs himself deeper and deeper. That’s Robert Devereaux, 2^nd Earl of Essex. 

He managed to get in Queen Elizabeth’s good graces by being witty and charming and making fun of people she disliked.  He completely failed to grasp the concept of “Just because you can make your boss laugh, that doesn’t mean you’re friends.”   He would get into shouting matches with her and once drew his sword.   This is a guy who is profoundly unaware of the danger he is in. 

In 1589, he shipped out with Francis Drake to invade Spain, defying the Queen’s orders.  He did OK at the beginning.  He captured Cadiz, that was pretty good.  He managed to screw things up again when he was supposed to be hunting the Spanish Armada and decided instead to chase after some treasure ships, again defying the queen.  This was the Spanish Armada that showed up off the British coast and scared the wits out of everyone and was only stopped by the luck of the weather. 

Even though Devereaux should be having closed-door meetings with Human Resources at this point, he managed to talk himself into a position as head of the army that was going to go over and crush the Irish for a while.  He led a massive army into Ireland, wandered around for a bit, lost a bunch of battles and signed a truce with the very people he was supposed to be crushing.  Her Majesty was nonplussed to say the least. 

Again, against the Queen’s orders, he traveled back to London and surprised the Queen in her bedroom while she was still in her jim-jams.  He was confined to quarters but later released.  He was destitute and feeling put-upon.  He appears to have felt that this was all really unfair.  He decided to overthrow the government and got a bunch of his drinking buddies to go along with him.  He marched in to London, demanded an audience with the Queen, was immediately arrested and immediately surrendered.  It wasn’t quite that simple but it makes the Beer Hall Putsch look well-organized. 

And so he got his head cut off, less because of his stupid rebellion and more because the Queen was sick of his shit.  There’s a lesson in there somewhere.  An interesting question is, “What was Devereaux’s deal?”  He wasn’t mentally handicapped because he was famous for his eloquence and wit.  Was he, perhaps “on the spectrum” to use a modern phrase?   I like to think he was a really incompetent time traveler.

History Spotlight, 11/9

The infamous Beer Hall Putsch is crushed in Germany on this day in 1923.  Like many events in the 20^th Century, the Beer Hall Putsch stems from the unsatisfactory end to World War I.  The winning powers in the war, mostly Britain and France (well, mostly France) wanted a vengeful peace that made sure Germany stayed down.  Previous to the war, Germany would be what modern minds would term a “First World” nation.  By the standards of the time, they were certainly up there.  They had a sweet empire (not as sweet as Britain’s), a kick-ass navy (not as kick-ass as Britain’s) and an industrial establishment that was every bit the power house that Britain’s was.  

After the war, they had nothing.  No colonies, no navy and crippling war reparation payments.  Hitler, and quite a few other Germans, felt the Treaty of Versailles was a betrayal by egghead civilians and Marxists and, let’s not mince words, Jews.  The Germans had the right to be surprised.  They had been led to believe that Germany had been winning the war that their armies could not be defeated and now everything had been lost. 

Hitler was but one of thousands of disillusioned, angry de-mobbed soldiers hanging around with nothing to do.   In the cities, violence became commonplace as different factions fought it out in the street.  This was also the high-water mark of in the infamous Weimar inflation where a wheelbarrow full of cash bought you a slice of bread.   Apparently (and I never knew this) Hitler still had some affiliations with the German army and had been ordered to infiltrate the German Workers Party (DAP) and find out what they were up to.  Secret agent Hitler?  Anyway, Hitler joins the DAP and finds out that they’re a bunch of swell guys.  Hey, these guys are crazy nationalist who hate the Jews too! It’s a match made in heaven. 

It wasn’t too long before Hitler was running the DAP and made them from a bunch of guys getting drunk and bitching about the Jews into a viable political force.  Hitler took as his model for seizing power Mussolini’s coup the year before in 1922.  But Germany ain’t Italy, as Hitler would later learn.   Hitler took 600 of his closest buds and a bunch of machine guns and surrounded the beer hall where one of Hitler’s rivals was making a speech.  Hitler stormed into the hall, fired into the air, jumped up on a table and shouted, "The national revolution has broken out! The hall is filled with six hundred men. Nobody is allowed to leave."  Not exactly, “You have nothing to lose but your chains.” 

Well, it didn’t work. The Nazis went on to cause all sort of mischief, beating people up and generally being a nuisance.  Buy November 9^th, the writing was on the wall. Nobody was signing up for the revolution, the DAP was like, “We just wanted to drink beer, man.” “And bitch about the Jews!” “Yeah, and bitch about the Jews!” and the government was starting to get tired of this shit.  The putsch was crushed and Hitler did a year in jail using his time to write Mein Kampf, one of the most unreadable books ever written.