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.