(3 of 7)
In reaching this comfortable estate, Frank Costello had also achieved a peculiar but significant place in U.S. society. The rackets, like college football, the labor movement, and the care and breeding of Christmas trees, had inevitably become big business. The brain had replaced the muscle, the injunction had become more potent than the Tommy gun, and surviving warriors of prohibition upheld the status quo. Frank Costello, "legitimate businessman," dramatically typified the change.
Up from Craps. The twisting road which led Frank Costello to a tower apartment on Central Park West began in Cosenza, Italy, where, in 1891, he was born Francesco Castiglia, sixth child of a debt-burdened farmer. He was brought to New York when he was four; his father opened a hole-in-the-wall grocery on East 108th Street, and he was exposed early.to the neighborhood heroes: the torpedoes who worked for Giro Terranova, red-handed boss of the Unione Siciliana in Harlem and The Bronx.
They fired his imagination. He quit school when he was eleven to sell newspapers and run a kids' crap game—a project which meant paying off the Irish cop on the beat. He soon graduated to sterner enterprise. When he was 17, he was charged with assault and robbery, but the charge was dismissed. In 1912, when he was 21, he was arrested for robbing a woman of $1,600 on the street and again the charge was dropped. But in 1915, Gunman Francesco Castiglia, alias Frank Saverio, alias Frank Stello, was jailed and convicted of illegal possession of a pistol.
Old court records describe the dark little drama—how the defendant ran from two suspicious policemen and threw his pistol into a lot, how he was caught, dragged back, and how the weapon was found. They tell of his pleas for mercy, made at first in Italian through a court interpreter, and finally in English, and they repeat the words of a forgotten judge:
"I have got it right from his neighbors that he has the reputation of being a gunman and in this particular case he ... had a very beautiful weapon and was . . . prepared to do the work of a gunman. He was charged on two other occasions with doing the work of a gunman and, somehow or other, got out of it. Now I commit him to the penitentiary for one year . . ."
He served ten months; it was the only time he ever went to prison.
Kewpies & Creditors. Frank Costello, businessman extraordinary, was born after that. The tale of his ventures and triumphs emerged only in jerky scenes, badly lighted and often confused. But each time he appeared, momentarily in the light, Frank Costello looked bigger, sharper, more assured—and richer.
He ran Harlem crap games. He was a partner in something called the Horowitz Novelty Co. which dealt in Kewpie dolls, razor blades and punchboards. It went bankrupt, left its creditors holding the sack, was reborn as the Dainties Products Co.—and boomed. He put his money into real estate, built apartments and five-story walkups in Upper Manhattan and The Bronx, and with his investments hit another jackpot.