MANNERS & MORALS
(See Cover)
The 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.
Jostling armies of liquid-eyed children still play in its filthy, glass-strewn alleys, its dark hallways, and in vacant lots, where the refuse of generations is packed solid, a foot higher than the sidewalks. Its old men are sad. The young men who haunt its streets by night—callow bravoes with oiled black hair, sharp suits and the melancholy curse of pimples—loiter in knots with expressionless faces, just as they did when Frank Costello had a gun in his pocket and was one of them.
Then, as now, East 108th Street was a hard place to live. It was harder to leave. The palaces of Manhattan's power and wealth rose up only a few blocks to the south, but to the 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.
He was not the only boy from a slum who got rich in the rackets: in his day the U.S. had become as much a land of opportunity for the graduate of Dannemora as for the graduate of Dartmouth. But Frank Costello had the brains, luck and jungle caution to stay rich—rich, alive and free as air—while Al Capone went raving to his grave, while bullets cut down Dutch Schultz and Dion O'Banion, while Lepke Buchalter burned in the electric chair, while Lucky Luciano went off to exile and a hundred minor hoodlums rotted in prison.
Last week, greying, hoarse-voiced, 58-year-old Frank Costello was fast becoming a figure of U.S. legend. Millions of newspaper readers considered him a kind of master criminal, shadowy as a ghost and cunning as Satan, who ruled a vast, mysterious and malevolent underworld and laughed lazily at the law.
Rumor clung to him like filings to a magnet. Wise guys whispered knowingly that he had ordered the Beverly Hills murder of his old friend Bugsy Siegel, the shooting of Los Angeles Hoodlum Mickey Cohen and dozens of other cases of violence. In three months he had been charged with influencing politics in New York, Kansas City, Los Angeles and New Orleans. Crime commissions speculated feverishly that he owned gambling houses and nightclubs from Florida to California, controlled race wires across the nation, ran the baleful Unione Siciliana (i.e., the U.S. Mafia) and financed everything from narcotics smuggling to jewel theft.