The Resurrection of Frank Costello

“questa nostra cosa non muore” — Italian graffiti scrawled at the bombing of Frank Costello’s mausoleum, (this thing of ours does not die)

A quarter-of-a-mile from the cemetery, diners heard the explosion from inside the newly-renovated Terrace Restaurant atop the airport’s only terminal building. They probably didn’t know it was a bomb.

Though it was exceptionally warm for a January evening in Queens, forty-four degrees, the signature outdoor dining section was closed because ten-mile-an-hour winds dropped the “feels like” temperature to a chillier thirty-eight degrees.

Propane-fueled outdoor infrared heaters had been introduced to the New York restaurant scene four years earlier, but they had not been installed at LaGuardia Airport’s showcase patio eatery. Hence, there was no alfresco dining on this particular Friday night in East Elmhurst.

The subsequent lack of jet-fuel-infused outdoor ambiance allowed diners to assume that the explosive boom was just another engine blast from one of the seven-hundred-and-eighty-five daily flights in and out of LaGuardia. For all practical purposes, the explosion went unnoticed.

In 1974, airports still were more affluent travel hubs than the mass-transit bus-station like waiting rooms they would become in the next few decades. In that upscale context, airport ambiance actually was a “thing”; though not nearly as cool as it had been a decade earlier. Into that coolness, famed restauranteurs Jerome Brody and Joseph Baum had remodeled The Terrace to capture those trendy elements and (hopefully) attract high-end diners who were not flying but wanted the jet-setting status of airport dining; a hard-to-grasp concept in the 21st century.

Four floors above the airport’s well-known, but by then painted-over, James Brooks WPA mural of the history-of-flight, the swanky-menu Terrace Restaurant was an elegant escape for Manhattan couples and others wanting to flee the City without leaving its taxi and car-service convenience. No one would have predicted feeling the air-shock waves from a bombing.

It was almost two full years before the TWA baggage-claim bombing that would kill eleven and injure seventy-four; so, there was no heightened sense of concern at New York airports. Most passengers, and certainly the restaurant patrons, ignored the single blast or mingled it in their consciousness with the actual jet blasts. Unconcerned, diners continued their meals and passengers moved on to their flights or to their cabs.

The bombing was intended to implode and decimate the classic-Roman granite mausoleum housing the body of the last of the founding patriarchs of the so-called Mafia. The plan was to send a powerful symbolic message that the old order gangsters were dust and a new kind of organization had replaced them; gambling was out, and narcotics-distribution would be the new primary business of La Cosa Nostra.

Instead, the amateurish explosion only blew open the heavy bronze doors and left the much-more imaginative perception that the tomb’s occupant had resurrected and thrown open the portals for his spirit to re-emerge. The mausoleum itself was undamaged beyond the ripped-open doors.

If pop culture must suffer forever the erroneous but mythologically colorful tying of Las Vegas’ origins to the image of Bugsy Seigel’s body and bloody eye sockets on his girlfriend’s davenport, then Atlantic City needs equally vivid imagery for its beginnings — iconography that is current lacking. Few images could better epitomize Atlantic City’s cycles of deaths and rebirths than the flung-open crypt and the arisen specter of America’s first slot machine king.

Not even two-years out of high school and deeply involved in the Wounded Knee American Indian defense committee as well as a host of other radical-folksinger causes, I was completely oblivious to the almost-not-newsworthy bombing story. Nonetheless, and without being melodramatic, it would be barely five years later that the reactions to that explosion would have significant impact on my own life in the little picture and on the direction of the United States Government in the big picture. No, really; no hyperbole here.

While Seigel’s should-have-been-only-a-footnote contribution to Vegas instead is hallowed as genius epiphany in the desert, the corresponding Atlantic City seminal moment is rarely even a footnote. That is how the tomb’s occupant would have wanted it. Understated humility is often an earmark of true genius.

With neighboring grave sites of ragtime composer Scott Joplin and a half-dozen Congressional Medal of Honor recipients, Frank Costello’s mausoleum was on lot 14 in section 15 of the cemetery at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Queens. Only eight blocks from the terminal building, it was not surprising that restaurant patrons could hear the explosion. Third in a row of two-dozen small mausoleums separated from Astoria Boulevard and Grand Central Parkway only by a single row of young trees and a narrow driveway, the crypt was visible from the southern tip of LaGuardia’s main runway.

Somewhat ironically, it was that mausoleum which had led to the one and only federal criminal conviction in Frank Costello’s life and eventually sent him to a short residency at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta where he joined west coast mob figure Mickey Cohen at the past and future home of such infamous luminaries as Eugene Debs, Whitey Bulger, Frank Abagnale, Carlo Ponzi, Marcus Garvey, my close friend (and central ABSCAM figure) Congressman John Jenrette, Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain, Little Nicky Scarfo, Phil Driscoll, Woody Harrelson’s dad, my great-uncle Craig, a collection of soviet spies including Rudolph Abel, and (of course) Al Capone.

After multiple failures to tie Costello to bootlegging, assorted murders, a host of concocted charges, and especially to illegal or untaxed gambling, the government decided to switch tactics and focus on the Al Capone technique. In 1931 the IRS had finally brought down Capone with income tax evasion charges. On the heels of that much-publicized victory, the following year, 1932, the IRS turned their untouchables onto Costello.

Unlike the flamboyant Capone, however, Frank Costello was very careful with his spending. It was hard to show that he spent more than his reported $39,500 annual income. While agents were able to show that he had real estate and other assets valued at $206,819, repeatedly they were unable to find any evidence that he actually paid for those assets.

Nonetheless, the agency tried to bring charges in 1932, 1946, 1947, 1948, and 1949; all to no avail. Finally, in June of 1952, the Internal Revenue ordered their New York Intelligence Division to track every dollar spent by Costello or his wife Lauretta (who friends called “Bobbie”).

Agents John Murphy and Wilfred Leath, in apparent frustration over Costello’s wiliness, decided to shift their focus from Frank to Bobbie. Agents began intensive fulltime surveillance and analysis of Bobbie’s shopping habits. They witnessed her spending at dress shops, at Tiffaney’s, at hat shops, and other upscale boutiques. They followed her to a tailor shop where she ordered a suit for her husband. They questioned staff at restaurants where she would stop for lunch.

Ultimately, the anally-diligent tax enforcers were able to document her ownership of two fur coats and two cars; but still nothing to trace the actual spending. Even repeated trips to banks, where the couple were often seen, failed to produce evidence of funds beyond the reported income.

Delving even deeper, the agents subpoenaed bank microfilm of cancelled checks signed by either Frank or Bobbie. At long last, after 22 years of assiduous investigation, in 1954 the agents finally found a suspicious check that they were certain would be the key to bringing down the gambling kingpin and keeping America free of its second favorite vice.

On the microfilm Agent Murphy spotted a check for $5.10 (that’s right, five-dollars-and-ten-cents) with the payee’s name too smudged to read. Empowered by the discovery of five unaccounted-for dollars — five dollars greater than the stated income — the agent carefully studied the endorsement on the back side of the check. The five-bucks had been deposited in a bank in Queens that had not been in the target list. Now the IRS was on to something!

Without a warrant, the agent headed to the bank and demanded to review all cleared checks on the date of the endorsement. Wading through the bundled papers, the defender of justice found the suspicious check. Bobbie had signed the five-dollars-and-ten-cents check made out to a plant nursery for landscaping. Ah-ha!

When properly grilled, the owner of the nursery proudly reported that the check came from the famous Frank Costello for landscaping his future plot at St. Michael’s Cemetery. The landscaper added that there had been no work for several years because there was on-going construction of an impressive Roman-temple style crypt at the plot.

Invigorated with this breakthrough into the obvious inner-workings of a criminal empire, agents hurried to the church to grill the Rector for complacent criminal activities with illegal gambling money. Reluctantly admitting it was Costello’s plot (the name carved into the granite structure sort of confirmed that without the clergyman’s confession), the Church Rector reported that Mrs. Costello had paid $4,888 cash for the plot. That, however, did not explain who had paid the construction company that was building the mausoleum.

Another adventure quest and the agents discovered that the construction company had no record of anyone named Costello or Geigerman (Bobbie’s maiden name) paying for anything. However, after intense probing, the agents determined that an elderly stonemason, who not-so-coincidentally lived on the same street as Costello’s mother, had hired the construction company and ordered the work.

Under movie-script-perfect bright-light interrogation, the elderly mason explained that it all had been a favor for a friend, and nothing nefarious. He told agents that a young man had given him the blueprints for a mausoleum and asked him to get bids for the construction. His instructions were to report the bids to a phone number scrawled on the bottom of the blueprint. That number was answered by Frank Costello, who chose the winning bid and sent a messenger to deliver $100-bills to the mason, who in turn paid for the work.

Altogether, the IRS investigation of the five-dollar-and-ten-cents check uncovered total cash expenditures of almost $24-thousand relating to that mausoleum.

After 22-years of extensive investigating, American taxpayers finally found justice as the 63-year-old slot machine king was sent to prison and fined $30-thousand. I am not sure if anyone compared the salaries and costs of the two-decade pursuit against the $30k collected; but it is often said that justice has no price tag.

The highly-publicized trial gave pop “mafia” culture one of its classic conversational exchanges, Frank’s lawyer told him that the $400 suits he was wearing to court ($3,750 in 21st century money) hurt his case in the eyes of the jury. When the Counselor suggested he buy a cheap off-the-rack suit, Costello responded, “I’d rather blow the goddamned case than dress like a schmuck.”

Costello’s old-style mafioso comportment was movie matinee fodder compared to the gratuitous viciousness of the drug-dealers and extortionists who eventually had taken control of the “five families” of Mafia lore. A decades-long struggle inside “organized crime” had pitted Costello’s world against the up-and-coming narcotics rackets; not dissimilar to the plot of The Godfather movie — which has often been compared to Costello’s life story (even down to Brando’s effectuated raspy voice and a failed assassination attempt over his opposition to the drug trade).

Costello’s life story: his opposition to the drug trade that resulted in his being shot by a rival mob boss; the police finding a matchbook with details of skimming at the Las Vegas Tropicana casino; his testimony (or rather refusals) before the Senate the Kefauver Committee on Organized Crime; his retirement from “Cosa Nostra”; all have been told and retold in both fiction and nonfiction. In that regard, his story is well known. What is not-so-told is how rival’s revenge after his death changed everything for casino gambling.

Reducing the real-life Godfather’s final resting place to ashes and rubble would have left no doubt about the intended message; especially if the explosion had created a Vegas-like implosion and a Grucci-style fireworks exposition. But it did not.

In its place, the failed visual was so vivid that it inspired some local wag to scribble on a side wall, “La Costa Nostra does not die”, in Italian. Beyond that symbolic imagery, the very-public airing of disrespect served as a “Remember the Alamo” rallying cry that began the most successful legal gambling empire in American history; the diametrical opposite effect from what had been planned.

By 2022, forty-nine years after that botched bombing, Atlantic City slot machines were earning two-and-a-half times more than Las Vegas Strip slot machines. Despite repeated obituaries of the Atlantic City casino market, it remained not only healthy but metrically healthier than Las Vegas.

By that same time, Indian Casinos, which were non-existent before the bombing, were earning more than $34-billion annually. Despite decades of struggling for sovereignty, Tribes didn’t take the actual casino plunge until it was in part facilitated by people responding to the mausoleum bombing.

At very least, all of this new gambling revenue is the legacy of the mausoleum’s occupant, Frank Costello; the man who The Chicago Tribune once had dubbed “The Slot Machine King” of America. The failed message of the bombing jump-started political campaigns driven by otherwise disparate forces. Long stalled forces were rallied to action by the resurrected ghost of Frank Costello; and to this day, many of those surviving forces have no idea that Costello was the impetus of their work — and most deny it.

Much more far-reaching, the resurrection of Frank Costello represented a vindication of gambling as a profession. The preposterous Federal scouring over a $5.10 check and decades-long pursuits to prove gambling-income became anachronistically moot less than a half-dozen years after the explosion; very specific gambling income reporting guidelines were finally delineated in Title 26 of the U.S. Code’s Internal Revenue Act and income from the activities of Sporting Men became officially legitimate. Today there are even tax forms (IRS forms W2-G and 5754 to withhold federal income tax from cash or noncash gambling winnings).

That botched bombing changed the world.