Nov 14 2007
HIS DAD BROUGHT DOWN THE MOB
The ‘Mafia Summit’ stakeout
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
