Capone’s Cousins: The Fischetti Brothers
Capone’s forebears came from large families, which meant he had a lot of cousins on both sides of the water. Some believe that Frank Nitto was related through Al’s mother, the former Teresina Raiola. But the evidence for that seems to be based largely on his family’s proximity in Brooklyn. Others who were said to be cousins of Capone were named Ambroginos, Agoglias, LaRosas. But everyone who has tried to delve into Capone’s Italian ancestry has been frustrated by the illiteracy, distrust and omerta of many Italian immigrants and the loss of public and church records during World War II.
But the most widely recognized Capone cousins were the five Fischetti brothers. Two middle brothers — William and Nicholas — apparently kept their noses clean. But the rest — Charlie, Rocco, and, eventually, little brother Joseph — followed their Capone cousins into the rackets. Brooklyn-born, Charles and Rocco are said to have come to Chicago in 1920, eventually to serve as their elder cousin Al’s chauffeur and bodyguard, respectively.
They remained in Capone’s shadow, but profitably: rising in the Organization to manage his Cook County gambling operations. But it was not until the Feds sent Capone downriver for tax evasion that they came into their own, running casinos and floating crap games from Chicago to Kansas City. The papers claimed that their bootleg and gambling operations grossed an unlikely $20,000,000 a year.
Charlie was said to be the canniest, and for a gambling kingpin, his criminal record was sparse. He was questioned in various murder, gambling, and labor racketeering investigations; convicted and sentenced to one year for gun possession (like Capone before him); but otherwise arraigned on mostly penny-ante charges.
However, his gangland reputation was fearsome. A master of malocchio, he was known to sit in a corner during negotiations and direct his unblinking, intimidating stare at anyone who tried to stand in the way of the Outfit’s union takeovers. He is reputed to have received the Outfit’s contract to assassinate the wayward showboat Bugsy Siegel, but who actually pulled the trigger has never been determined.
Frustrated by the way Charlie seemed to get away with murder, William Drury of the Chicago Police Department tried to frame him for the bludgeoning death of a fellow gangster’s “dice girl.” But when Drury was gunned down in Kansas City seven years later, he would have despaired that Fischetti was never even questioned.
Some who speculate about what became of Capone’s millions suspect his cousins made off with most of it. As evidence, they point to Charlie’s Allison Island beachfront mansion that was every bit as swank as Capone’s Palm Island spread a couple of miles south.
In 1946 and again in 1947, the Fischettis accompanied Frank Sinatra to Havana to deliver the singer to entertain at mob conferences arranged by Tony Accardo. (Sinatra’s documented mob associations were legion, and persisted throughout his life.) On the 1946 flight, the brothers’ luggage contained $2,000,000 in cash that they handed over to deportee Lucky Luciano to cover earnings from the stateside rackets he continued to control.
By 1951, the Kefauver Committee had come to regard the Fischettis as the equals of such kingpins as Costello, Luciano, Accardo, Joe Adonis, and Jake Guzik. When the Committee sent their Sergeant-at-Arms to serve the Fischettis with subpoenas, the brothers fled to Acapulco, Mexico. In their absence, Kefauver summoned Charlie’s wife to testify. When she pleaded the Fifth, Kefauver threatened to hold her in contempt.
The brothers hid out in Mexico as long as they could, but a little over a week after the authorities caught up with them, Charlie succumbed to a heart attack. His New York funeral, featuring 35 limousines and $30,000 worth of floral tributes, was attended by some 1,500 mourners, many of them the wives of gangsters who did not want to show their faces to the detectives patrolling the crowd.
When a grieving Rocco testified before Kefauver, he too pleaded the Fifth on the grounds that he might incriminate himself in any tax evasion prosecution the government might be cooking up. For his reticence, the Committee charged him with contempt, but a judge acquitted him on the grounds that Rocco’s fears were probably well founded.
Despite acting as a bodyguard for Capone, a job that likely included taking part in assassinations, Rocco’s record was even sparser than his big brother’s. He sometimes operated as Robert Fisher, and was once fined for presenting a driver’s license under that name after his Cadillac convertible struck a car, injuring a fifteen year-old girl.
Rocco remained at the helm of the brothers’ gambling operation, with his little brother Joe acting as errand boy. But Rocco wasn’t deemed worthy of much coverage until he was in his fifties. In 1959, the police raided his “floating crap game,” a mobile casino that was reportedly earning Accardo’s Outfit hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of dollars annually. Though Rocco offered the raiding party $10,000 to look the other way, the cops turned him down, and during the course of their search came upon nearly $90,000 in cash. But the reliably incompetent police had proceeded without obtaining a warrant, and a judge made them return their windfall to Rocco and his partners.
In 1964, shortly after another raid in which the police arrested not only Rocco and his partners but their well-heeled patrons as well, Rocco raised bail and went east to visit relatives in Massapequa, Long Island, where he died, like his brother, of a heart attack.
Copyright © 2018 by Andrew Ward. All rights reserved.
