Robert Croswell at home in Vestal, with newspaper articles about his dad, Edgar Croswell, a state police sergeant who broke up the largest meeting of mobsters on November 14, 1957, in Apalachin, New York. (Times Herald-Record/MICHELE HASK)

Apalachin — Fifty years ago today, this hamlet on Exit 66 off Route 17 was like Woodstock for mobsters. But the party came to an abrupt end because of a native son of Woodstock, a state police sergeant named Edgar Croswell.

Matter of fact, you could say that when Croswell rousted Mafia bosses with names like Joseph Bonnano and Joseph Profaci; Carlo Gambino and Russell Bufalino, the Mafia began sliding into oblivion. Up until then, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had soft-pedaled the presence of the mob, but the stones that Croswell kicked over at Apalachin led to investigations galore, the passage of new state and federal racketeering laws and the fabled code of silence being broken in pieces by Mafia songbirds like “Sammy the Bull” Gravano.

Croswell died in 1990 at age 77. His son, Robert, is a state police lieutenant who works out of the same barracks in Delaware County as his father once did. The younger Croswell patrols the same roads his father did and knows the same landmarks.

His father never pushed him to join the police — Croswell’s plan was to become a veterinarian, and he took the state police test while he was studying at Cornell University. He now serves as the family historian, maintaining bound volumes of newspaper clippings, congratulatory letters and even an aerial drawing of the farm his father staked out that day in 1957.

Sgt. Edgar Croswell had recruited another trooper and two U.S. Treasury agents to accompany him that day because he thought something was going on at the home of Joseph Barbara, the owner of a 58-acre estate on McFall Road in Apalachin, a hamlet in Tioga County. It’s a few miles outside Binghamton. The night of Nov. 13, Barbara’s son was booking rooms at a nearby motel, and there were a bunch of cars with out-of-state plates parked outside Barbara’s home.

A year earlier, a New York City hood named Carmine Galante had been stopped for speeding on Route 17. He gave the trooper another man’s license, and it turned out that Galante and his traveling companions were being hosted by Barbara.

A slew of politicians and other influential people came out of the woodwork to make sure that Galante got off light. So Croswell’s antennae were up.

The morning of Nov. 14, Croswell, his partner, Vincent Vasisko, and two Treasury agents were writing down license plates outside Barbara’s big house when they were spotted. The mobsters took off running, some through the woods. Croswell had troopers set up a roadblock at the base of the hill on McFall Road, and they intercepted 58 of Joseph Barbara’s guests.

They had no reason to fingerprint or photograph them. But they took down names, looked up arrest records and the headlines kept coming for months. Front-page headlines. Big, blaring headlines in the New York papers. Grand juries were convened, congressional hearings were held. The mob had a hand in everything from gambling to labor racketeering to loan-sharking, and its tentacles also reached deep into legitimate businesses.

Croswell was a star witnesses. He later investigated the mob as a member of the state’s Organized Crime Task Force. But he was never the Hollywood type. These days, when Robert Croswell looks at a 1959 Parade magazine photo that shows his father brandishing a gun, he chuckles. “If you knew my father,” he says, “that had to be staged. Because my father didn’t like guns.”

There was some gentle ribbing along the way. Came with the territory. One time, a hospital nurse told Edgar Croswell that if anyone came in carrying a violin case, she was quitting on the spot.

The people in the neighborhood still call it “The Mafia House.” But these days, the wildest things to be found there are some horses.

HIS DAD BROUGHT DOWN THE MOB – By Oliver Mackson – Times Herald-Record – November 14, 2007 – http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071114/NEWS/711140353

Underboss
Second in command. Often makes decisions without involving the boss.

Capo
Lieutenant, leading his own section of the family. Capos often have territories or are in charge of different rackets. A capo keeps some of the money earned by his racket; the rest gets passed up to the underboss and boss. Capos have armies of “soldiers” working for them.

Soldier
The lowest rank among family members. They’re part of the family, but they make very little money and do most of the dirty work.

Associate
Not an actual member of the Mafia, but works with the mob. Typical associates are burglars, drug dealers, lawyers, investment bankers, police officers and politicians.

Consigliere
An adviser to the family, but not a member of the family’s hierarchy. Consiglieres are supposed to make impartial decisions based on fairness rather than personal feelings or vendettas. However, in reality, many consiglieres aren’t impartial.

Mafia ‘family tree’ – Star-Gazette – November 11, 2007 – http://www.stargazettenews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071111/NEWS01/711110346

Five decades ago this week, a police raid sent Mafia bosses, their underbosses and capos running through the woods of Apalachin — and into American history and popular culture.

Carlo “Don Carlo” Gambino – N.Y. Gambino Family Boss (Brooklyn, N.Y.)

Some of the most famous names in the Mafia — Carlo Gambino, Michael Genovese, Russell Bufalino (later crime boss of northeastern Pennsylvania), Joseph Profaci (the model for Don Corleone of “The Godfather” fame) — were in town Nov. 14, 1957, ostensibly for a steak roast at the Tioga County estate of ailing local mobster and Endicott soda distributor Joseph Barbara.

But in reality, they were there to divide up the New York City area empire of Albert Anastasia, former head of the Genovese family, who’d been taken out in a mob hit while sitting in a barber chair the month before. They also were there — as many as 120 mobsters, some from as far away as California — to decide whether the Mafia should get involved in the nation’s illegal drug trade.

But the peaceful mobster conclave got interrupted by two wily state police investigators who showed up and began writing down license plate numbers.

A day before the raid, state police Sgt. Edgar Croswell and Investigator Vincent Vasisko were sniffing around at the Parkway Hotel in Vestal on another case when they got wind of the Mafia conclave. They had overheard Joseph Barbara’s son making reservations for some “distributors” who were coming to town. The two cops shuttled back and forth between Vestal and Apalachin taking down license plate numbers.

When the cops showed up at Barbara’s the next day, some of the visitors took to the hills; others were questioned and let go at a police roadblock on McFall Road, where Barbara lived.

And about 20 of them were rounded up and taken to the state police station, then in Vestal.

Earlier that day, Binghamton Sun reporter David Rossie had been making police checks at the Vestal barracks when he noticed there were numerous trooper cars parked out back. Ever the great reporter, Rossie, now a Sunday columnist for the Press & Sun-Bulletin, asked the desk sergeant what was up.

A “speedometer check,” he was told.

Hours later, Rossie got a hurried call from the same desk sergeant.

“Get your ass down here,” Sgt. Walt Kennedy told Rossie.

He did.

Straight into the fire.

What he found were numerous well-dressed men wearing thousand-dollar coats.

No one seemed to want to talk to him, he recalled. “I was just a raggedy-ass reporter,” Rossie said. “They acted like I was from another planet.”

Croswell let Rossie sit in on some of the police interviews. One of the mobsters — a Californian — was asked to empty his pockets. He pulled out a rolled-up wad of cash the size of a beer can, Rossie recalled. Croswell asked the mobster what he did for a living.

“I’m unemployed,” the mobster replied.

No one was arrested that day. “It wasn’t against the law to gather and talk about how they were going to kill someone,” Rossie said.

But the day had far-reaching effects, Rossie said. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover could no longer pretend that the crime families were not organized, Rossie said. What followed were decades of prosecutions, hits, informants, books and movies.

The Mafia became a household word.

For Rossie, it brought a fascination with the mob.

He was a faithful fan of the HBO series hit, “The Sopranos.”

“I have never missed an episode,” he said.

Gary Sharpe also is a self- admitted fan of “The Sopranos.”

The Albany-based federal judge prosecuted members of the mob as a U.S. attorney in Binghamton in the 1980s and 1990s.

Sharpe prosecuted Joseph “Guv” Guarnieri, a capo in the Barbara family, who’d been present at the Apalachin conclave. Sharpe was 10 in 1957.

The local mob has waned, if not disappeared, since Sharpe was a prosecutor.

“I know or believe there is little if any mob left in the area,” the judge said. “What the current state is, I don’t know.”

And the man who once rubbed shoulders in a courtroom with mobsters agrees that the mob has been romanticized in popular culture. Mobsters are criminals, he said flatly. No more. No less.

But he said there is fairness in the way Tony Soprano was portrayed in the HBO series.

“It shows how endearing he can be,” Sharpe said. “Then he holds a gun to a person’s head and pulls the trigger.”

Apalachin raid on Mafia reverberates 50 years later – By Nancy Dooling – Sunday November 11, 2007 – Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin – http://www.pressconnects.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071111/NEWS01/711110391/1001

The government has opened an old treasure trove of information on some 800 gangland goons who wielded power during the Mafia’s Golden Age – a virtual Social Register of the worst sociopaths to have packed a silenced pistol, wielded an ice pick or driven a getaway car in a sharkskin suit.

The dossiers, complete with black-and-white photos, chronicle the backgrounds of wiseguys ranging from mob bosses Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, Sam Giancana and “Crazy Joe” Gallo to lesser lights like Al Capone’s two-bit hoodlum brothers.

The files read like single-page snapshots of the mobsters’ lives – their aliases and detailed physical descriptions, from distinguishing scars, tattoos and facial tics to styles of dress, home addresses, arrest histories and family trees – and even the names of mistresses.

Also revealed are the legitimate businesses they owned and their preferred leisure haunts – racetracks, prizefights, nightclubs and favorite restaurants – as well as an overview of the criminal status each man held within the larger Mafia firmament.

The 944 pages of material – featured in the book “Mafia,” due out Oct. 30 from HarperCollins – was mined from the raw intelligence gathered by agents of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of Narcotics, a forerunner of today’s Drug Enforcement Administration.

The cavalcade of hoods includes two men named Frank Paul Dragna, the son and nephew of one-time Los Angeles Mafia kingpin Jack Dragna.

The first Frank is known as “One Eye,” the second “Two Eye,” to distinguish the cousin with the glass right eye.

Entrants are listed by state, and New York, with more than 350 wiseguys, overwhelmingly leads the pack. A multitude of others resided in California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and Michigan. There are groupings of gangsters from Canada, France and Italy, as well.

The index cross-references each racketeer by nickname, many of them hilarious.

There’s “The Old Man” (there are, actually, three), “The Bald Head,” “Hunchback Harry,” “Schnozzola” (he has a large nose), “Mickey Mouse” (he has large ears), “Slim,” three people dubbed “Cockeyed,” as well as four “Fats” and a “Fat Artie,” “Fat Freddie,” “Fat Sonny” and “Fat Tony” for good measure.

There’s “Big Al,” “Big Frank” (two), “Big Freddy,” “Big John,” “Big Larry,” “Big Mike” (two), “Big Nose Larry,” “Big Pat,” “Big Phil,” “Big Sam,” “Big Sol,” “Big Yok” – even a “Mr. Big.”

The rogues’ hall of fame:

Johnny Roselli was the mob’s ambassador-without-portfolio, corrupting the film industry’s unions in Hollywood and becoming the go-to guy in Las Vegas and Miami. After testifying before a Senate committee and emerging as a player in the mob’s long-rumored involvement in JFK’s assassination, his body washed up off Miami.

Meyer Lansky was the mob’s gambling czar and set up casinos in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Hot Springs, Ark., New Orleans, Las Vegas, Florida and Cuba. Refused citizenship in Israel, he retired to Miami. Immortalized by actor Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth in “The Godfather II.”

Vito Genovese sought to dethrone Lucky Luciano as capo di tutti capi; conspired to assassinate mob rival Frank Costello, leading to the ill-fated mob conference in Apalachin, N.Y., that put the Mafia under the eye of investigators. Died in federal prison after mob cohorts reportedly set him up on a heroin rap.

Paul Castellano, Gambino’s heir, ran meat and poultry businesses and lived sumptuously in a Todt Hill, S.I., mansion known as “The White House.” Dapper Don John Gotti supposedly orchestrated his Dec. 16, 1985, assassination outside a Manhattan steakhouse.

Frank Costello was a Tammany Hall fixer and diplomat whose gravel-voiced persona supposedly was the inspiration for Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone in “The Godfather.” Lived on Park Avenue and in Sands Point, L.I.; retired after Vito Genovese’s failed assassination bid in May 1957.

Carmine Galante, a feared hit man and dope dealer, assumed the reins of the Bonanno crime family in the ’70s; was gunned down at an Italian restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where his bullet-riddled body lay crumpled on the ground, a cigar still hanging from his mouth.

Mickey Cohen, head of Los Angeles gambling rackets, maintained a host of powerful friends, including Frank Sinatra – who once appealed to him to get mobster Johnny Stompanato to stop dating Ava Gardner. Depicted by Harvey Keitel in the 1991 film “Bugsy” and by Paul Guilfoyle in 1997′s “L.A. Confidential.”

Carlo Gambino infiltrated the garment industry while heading the country’s largest and most powerful mob family, yet managed to avoid the limelight – and the scrutiny of cops – by living quietly at 2230 Ocean Parkway in Gravesend, Brooklyn. Died of a heart attack in 1976.

James Ralph “Bottles” Capone was the lesser-known and benignly named brother of the Windy City’s uber-gangster, Al “Scarface” Capone. Lived with a sister at Martha Lake, near Mercer, Wis., and was said to have had numerous arrests – but no felony convictions. He reputedly owned a vending machine business in western Chicago.

Charles “Lucky” Luciano, considered a visionary in mob history, helped engineer the five-family crime structure in New York City. Given 30 years for running brothels, he served only a decade behind bars, with the proviso that he be deported to Italy.

INSIDE FEDS’ MAFIA-PEDIA – By PHILIP MESSING – October 7, 2007 – NEW YORK POST – http://www.nypost.com/seven/10072007/news/nationalnews/inside_feds_mafia_pedia.htm

Christopher Duggan, a distinguished Italophile and professor of Italian history, describes the Mafia as a grotesque parody of Mediterranean family life. Cosa Nostra clans are known as cosche, after the Sicilian dialect term for artichoke leaves: the clans fit snugly inside each other, overlapping tightly.

Traditionally, in Sicily the Mafia dealt in loan-sharking and citrus fruit scams. By the entrepreneurial 1980s, it had spread into northern Italy as far as Milan and was heavily involved in the multi-national heroin trade.

The roots of the corruption lay in Sicily, though: clientism and family-based favouritism had been woven into the island’s social, political and cultural fabric since unification in 1861.

According to this new history of modern Italy, north-south antagonism intensified during the post-unification years, when Italy freed itself of its abhorred Habsburg and Bourbon rulers.

The patrician idealists and patriots who struggled for independence were mostly from the north; annexation with the corruptible south was tantamount (in the words of one Piedmontese grandee) to “getting into bed with someone with smallpox”.

So Turin – not Rome – became the first capital of united Italy. Its arcaded piazzas and geometric avenues were considered a salubrious alternative to Rome’s dark, pestilential backstreets.

Prejudice existed on both sides, but it was more pronounced in the prosperous north. Turinese still talk of the Mezzogiorno as where Europe ends. How many have been there is another matter; to look out across the Bay of Naples is still a visual education in the grand style; and Palermo, the ragamuffin capital of Sicily, still a jewel.

Rightly, the north-south question is the cornerstone of The Force of Destiny, an exhaustive, 650-page analysis of two centuries of Italian history.

Verdi’s dramatic Risorgimento opera of 1862, La forza del destino, has given Duggan a good title. Along the way, he resurrects lesser-known figures in Italy’s long struggle towards nationhood, among them the Turin-based anthropologist Cesare Lombroso.

With callipers and craniometry charts, Lombroso sought to define the existence of “delinquent” southern Italians by their physical characteristics. The misguidedness of his theory – southerners were known by prehensile feet and other “apish” stigmata – is evident. In the 1870s, however, he and his circle were hailed as civic-minded modernists.

Mussolini’s 23-year-long dictatorship, touted as a continuation of the Risorgimento, fused a violent contempt for parliamentary liberalism with the pompous cult of imperial Rome. The high priests of Fascism hailed Mussolini “divine Caesar” as he called for an embargo on all foreign locutions and non-Latin terms.

Thus Italians could no longer take a ferry-boat, but had to travel instead by pontone, as Julius Caesar had done.

Behind the classical bombast, Fascism relied on bludgeons and intimidation. The regime’s man in Sicily, Police Prefect Cesare Mori, was so intent on uprooting the Cosa Nostra that he deported or imprisoned suspected Mafiosi, removed their fingernails and crushed their genitals. The Mafia still came back with a vengeance at the war’s end.

And today? Half a century has passed since Italy’s pro-Fascist royal family abdicated and the Italian Republic was founded in 1946. Since then the hopes for a fairer, better Italy have not been met. The discontent is felt especially by the older generation who fought Fascism. Tax evasion is widespread, the orderly queue is unheard of; beaches are polluted and museums are falling down.

The so-called values of the Risorgimento – unity and liberalism – were dealt a new blow by the governments of Silvio Berlusconi, which dominated Italy more effectively than Mussolini ever did. Berlusconi controlled three television channels; through those he spread propaganda for his party and built a “videocracy” such as the world had never seen.

Like Mussolini, he provided entertainment for the masses (bosoms, football and money are the staples of his media empire) and patronage for family and friends.

Corruption is in any case now so widespread in Italy that it would be difficult to imagine a Sicilian property developer applying for planning permission, or a businessman not bribing a telephone engineer for a speedy installation.

For all that, Duggan does not seem unduly pessimistic about Italy and Italians. Their disregard for the rules may have undone of post-Fascist political hopes, but it has helped to create a vital and resilient people.

The Force of Destiny is a pleasure to read, and an enduring tribute to Italy’s struggle to free itself from foreign occupation and unite as a nation.

Like getting into bed with a smallpox victim – Last Updated: 12:01am BST 29/09/2007 – Telegraph Media Group Limited – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/09/29/bodug129.xml

Charles “Lucky” Luciano

One of the great pleasures in reading any chronicle of the Mafia is the rough street poetry of the names. In the pages of T J English’s enjoyable – yet morally uncertain – account of the rise and fall of the Mob’s Caribbean empire of gambling, pleasure, sin, murder and profit, we come across such figures as Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, William “Lefty Clark” Bischoff, and Nicholas “the Fat Butcher” di Costanzo.

The hero of the piece, though, is Meyer Lansky, who early on in his career was referred to as “the brightest boy in the combination”, but never did gain a gangster moniker. Instead, as suited his somewhat colourless but gentlemanly persona, he was referred to as “Mr Lansky”.
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“Gambling pulls at the heart of a man,” Lansky once said. He learned much of his trade during Prohibition and much of his wisdom from Arnold Rothstein (“The Brain”, “The Big Bankroll”), especially the importance of bribing politicians. Rothstein had the New York city mayor Jimmy Walker; Lansky had Fulgencio Batista, whom he chose early on in both their careers, long before Batista had become the self-styled “democratic dictator” of Cuba.

Unlike Rothstein, who was gunned down after an acrimonious poker game, Lansky only wanted to profit from other people’s impulses, not to indulge in his own. He became a kind of corporate visionary of gangsterism, one of the inventors of modern Las Vegas, particularly adept both at the “creative” use of money and at leaving no trace back to blood or a corpse.

Between 1952 and 1959, Batista’s second period of rulership of Cuba, “Havana became a volatile mix of Monte Carlo, Casablanca and the ancient city of Cádiz all rolled into one”, English breathlessly writes, “a bitches’ brew of high-stakes gambling, secret revolutionary plots, violent repression and gangsterism”.

Lansky and his associates controlled or owned the casinos and clubs, as well as the police, who often moonlighted as security guards for the Mob’s hotel-casinos, the banks and most of the politicians.

This was the consummation of a plan that Lansky had had for Cuba well before the Second World War, and which was first put into action following a convention of “dignitaries” in 1946, when Cuba’s future was carved up by the East Coast bosses, in between dining on such delicacies as tortoise stew and flamingo breast.

English is good on food – there is a telling image of Batista going crazy in the last days before Fidel Castro’s revolution, dining for hours at his country estate, interrupting the feast only to watch American horror movies and to vomit in the garden.

The author is less good on morality.

English denies any Mafia involvement in the drugs trade – this at a time when VIP members at one of the smarter Havana nightclubs had their own lockers to hold their cocaine stash. The generally held belief that Lansky’s colleague Santo Trafficante was one of the prime movers in the trade is implausibly dismissed as a result of the coincidence of Trafficante being the Spanish term for drugs trafficker.

English tends to praise Lansky’s business sense, while saving his condemnation for the likes of Albert Anastasia, a brutal assassin for the Mob who was in turn brutally assassinated. He is unable, or unwilling, to draw a connection between the gent and the beast.

When the rebels finally took control in 1959, the first things that went were the parking meters that were the personal money machines of Batista’s brother-in-law. The crowds went after them with hammers, lead pipes and baseball bats.

Then they took to the casinos, to demolish the slot machines, before setting a truckload of pigs free in the lobby of Lansky’s latest resort, the Riviera.

Just as Castro irked the US government for geo-political reasons, he outraged the gangsters with his low opinion of the profit motive.

It is a welcome reminder for those with nothing but hatred for Cuba’s current, declining dictator, that the US government and the Mafia frantically and farcically collaborated to get rid of Castro to restore their own vision of paradise.

The mafia paradise that was Havana – David Flusfeder – Last Updated: 12:01am BST 20/09/2007 – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/09/20/boeng115.xml

MOBSTER Tony “The Ant” Spilotro met a grisly end because he broke the Mafia code – by having an affair with another gangster’s wife.

Spilotro, said to be the inspiration behind Joe Pesci’s chilling character in the gangland movie Casino, was buried in a cornfield along with his brother.

Both were beaten and buried alive, just like Pesci’s Nicky Santoro and his brother in the Martin Scorsese movie, also starring Robert de Niro and Sharon Stone.

Spilotro was also skimming money from the mob from deals he made on the side, a jury trying a hitman for murder was told.

But his worst offence in Mafia eyes was having a fling with the wife of a Las Vegas mobster.

“Right then a nail went in the coffin,” convicted loan shark Frank Calabrese is heard saying on a tape.

It was played to the trial of Calabrese and four others accused in a conspiracy that involves 18 murders, including Spilotro’s. Spilotro was known as the Chicago mob’s man in Las Vegas and he boasted one day he’d be boss.

Calabrese was heard on the tape saying sex with the wife of a mob member violated their code.

“That is a no-no, that is a friend and that’s a commandment,” he told his son, who secretly recorded the conversation to help the FBI gather evidence against his father.

Calabrese said Spilotro and his brother Michael were murdered on orders from the big boss of the mob at the time, Joey Aiuppa. Referring to Spilotro, Calabrese said: “Joey Aiuppa had a meeting before they all went to jail and he told them he wanted Spilotro knocked down.”

On the tape, Calabrese then quoted Aiuppa as saying: “I don’t care how you do it. Get him. I want him out.”

Calabrese, 69, is on trial in Chicago along with James Marcello, 65, Joseph “Joey the Clown” Lombardo, 78, convicted jewel thief Paul Schiro, 70, and retired Chicago police officer Anthony Doyle, 62.

They are charged with taking part in a racketeering conspiracy that included the murders of the Spilotro brothers and 16 others.

Aiuppa was the top boss of the Chicago mob. He died in 1997, aged 89.

‘That’s a no-no. Right then, a nail went in the coffin’

MOBSTER BURIED ALIVE FOR MAFIA WIFE AFFAIR – By Don Mackay – 12 July 2007 – http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/news/tm_headline=mobster-buried-alive-for-mafia-wife-affair-&method=full&objectid=19442927&siteid=66633-name_page.html

BEFORE Tony Soprano or Don Corleone or Tony Montana there was Lucky Luciano — the real-life patriarch of modern organized crime.

Luciano was the Sicilian immigrant who rose to power in the Mafia in the U.S. in the 1920s and transformed it into a flourishing enterprise based on legitimate economic models. He ordered gangland killings, consolidated warring crime factions and began laundering profits from narcotics and prostitution through lawful businesses.

Criminals paid attention. So did the cops. Even the White House deferred to Luciano during World War II, imploring him to marshal the Mafia to help the Allies crush the enemy — a covert intervention that earned him a presidential pardon. Major studios struggled for decades to secure the rights to the mobster’s life story but failed because Luciano’s family was reluctant to bring his crime-filled saga to the screen.

Finally, a movie about Luciano is in the works, and the driving force behind the project is Joseph Isgro, a producer once branded a Mafia soldier by the FBI. Isgro was a producer on the 1992 film “Hoffa” while under indictment on racketeering charges.

How Isgro secured the rights remains a mystery — one he will not discuss except to say that he got them legitimately. Isgro says he was dogged by the same type of skepticism decades ago when he beat out Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and the studios to lock down the Jimmy Hoffa life-story rights.

“Listen, I was 15 years old when Luciano died,” the 60-year-old Isgro said in a recent interview. “If someone wants to try to associate me with Luciano, then so be it. The government has wasted millions of dollars of taxpayer money chasing me. You know what those guys say about me, right?”

Here’s what they say: In a 2000 affidavit, the FBI singled out Isgro as one of 192 identifiable members of the Gambino crime family — a mob soldier who has been under federal investigation for many years.

Isgro scoffs at those charges.

“I’m a soldier all right,” Isgro said. “A decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, and a proud member of the Isgro family.”

Isgro broke into Hollywood 15 years ago, producing “Hoffa,” a 20th Century Fox film about the mobbed-up union leader, which starred Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito. He and Gary Arnold are co-executive producing “Baby-O,” a movie starring Theresa Russell and David Proval that began shooting recently in Las Vegas.

For “Luciano,” Isgro has approached a specific A-list actor to play the lead role (whom he cannot yet publicly identify) and is wooing several actors from “The Sopranos” to join the cast. Isgro and his associate Dan Michaels, chief of Full Force Films, have also interviewed a number of writers and directors, including Charles Matthau, son of the late actor Walter Matthau. Isgro already signed hit music producer Scott Storch to score the soundtrack and is in talks with New Line Cinema to distribute the movie, according to New Line’s Joseph Khouri.

Corporate-style boss

Charles “Lucky” Luciano was born on Nov. 24, 1897, in a tiny, sulfur-mining town in Sicily called Lercara Friddi. His family immigrated to the U.S. in 1906.

Before he was 21, Luciano had established himself as a deft criminal, helping to consolidate the mob’s bootlegging operation on New York’s Lower East Side. He worked his way up into the inner circles of the nation’s biggest mobsters, Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano — and then orchestrated the assassinations of both men.

Not having investigated Italian railway timetables between 1922-43 I cannot report on the veracity of the first claim, but Tim Newark has exhaustively examined the second, and establishes beyond doubt that any notion that it was the Mob that won Sicily for the Allies is a myth.

The Sicilian campaign, he concludes, was, especially in its latter stages, as hard-fought as any other in the long and gruelling Italian war – although he admits that most of the stiffening resistance came from the German rather than the Italian defenders of the island.

The Italian reluctance to resist stemmed from their pragmatic realisation that, for them, the war was over. The same non-heroic spirit led, within weeks, to the palace putsch in Rome in July 1943 that brought down Mussolini. (He was later rescued and reinstated as the puppet ruler of northern Italy by his German masters).

Tim Newark’s fascinating book is not only an exposé of the Machiavellian behind-the-scenes machinations to ease Italy out of the war (though it is that too) but a sobering, and even chilling study in the realpolitik of war and of how the open power of politicians and Generals was closely shadowed – sometimes very closely indeed – by the hidden power of organised crime.

When Churchill said after Hitler’s invasion of Russia that he would ally with the Devil himself if necessary to bring the Nazis down, he spoke no less than the truth. Using unimpeachable contemporary documents, including recently declassified intelligence reports, Newark shows how the whole Allied chain of command, from the upright General Eisenhower to Roosevelt and Churchill himself, were prepared to give a nod and a wink to the blood-stained Dons who infested the island to secure their help in the Sicilian invasion. In Ike’s case this even extended to arming the Mafia.

The Mob, of course wanted their quid pro quo: the green light for a Mafia-run independent Sicilian state after the war. Newark shows how perilously close this came to fulfilment. In the event it took five years of guerilla warfare before the post-war Italian state re-established its shaky nominal authority.

The story starts in the 1920s with Mussolini’s crackdown on the Mafia in a series of mass trials. Leading Mafiosi, including Giuseppe ‘Joe Bananas’ Bonanno, fled the purges to New York, there to join a shifting alliance with other Mafia chieftains such as ‘Lucky’ Luciano in building the city’s big five crime families and nursing their grievance against the Duce who ruled their homeland.

Newark is sometimes distracted from his main thread with stories of how gangsters such as Luciano’s Jewish Consigliore, Meyer Lansky, plotted ineffectually against the Nazis, but he is at his best when writing about the core of his story: the uneasy alliance of convenience between the wartime powers – especially the US intelligence agencies, but even involving our own dear MI6 – and the Mob in securing Sicily as first base in the conquest of Italy.

Back in America this unholy collaboration gave the Mob a flying start to its golden Godfather age of the 1940s when men such as Luciano came close to dominating New York. The whole unsavoury story shows why the Axis propaganda posters portraying Churchill and Roosevelt as cigar-chewing, gun-toting mobsters were a little too close to the truth for comfort.

But in war necessity knows no law, and in relating this unappetising tale Newark fires perhaps the final shot into the bullet-riddled corpse of the myth that the Second World War was a black-and-white struggle of good against evil, and shows that the real picture is one of conflicting shades of grey.

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 24/05/2007 – Nigel Jones reviews The Mafia at War by Tim Newark – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/05/24/bonew20.xml