Mafia Men - Hoodwinkers, suckers and scams (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr Page B

get him sent to Alcatraz for eleven years. In prison, the syphilis from which he suffered, started to seriously affect his health and his mind deteriorated until he was released, a shadow of the man he once was. He died a few years later.
    A few days before Capone’s release, on Wednesday 8 November, however, Eddie O’Hare left his office at Sportsman’s Park in the Chicago suburb of Cicero. Unusually, he was carrying a .32-calibre semi-automatic pistol. He climbed into his black 1939 Lincoln Zephyr coupé and drove away from the greyhound track. At the intersection of Ogden and Rockwell, a dark coloured sedan drove up alongside his car. Two men stuck shotguns out of the car’s side windows and opened fire on E. J.’s car. He was killed instantly by the volleys and his Lincoln crashed into a lamppost at the side of the road. The car containing the killers sped off in an easterly direction on Ogden, getting lost in the afternoon traffic.
    Several months after O’Hare’s killing, Ursula Granata, his seven-year fiancée, married Frank Nitti, Al Capone’s second-in-command.
    When they found O’Hare, in his pocket was a poem that read:

The clock of life is wound but once
And no man has the power
To tell just when the hands will stop
At late or early hour
Now is the only time you own
Live, love, toil with a will
Place no faith in time
For the clock may soon be still

    For ‘Easy Eddie’ the clock was finally still.

Antonino Giuffrè
     
     
     
     
    ‘It’s very simple,’ Antonino Giuffrè once said, describing the relationship of Cosa Nostra to politics. ‘We are the fish and politics is the water.’
    Antonino Giuffrè , known as ‘Manuzza’, the Hand, because his right hand was withered by polio when he was young, was one of the most important state witnesses to emerge from the Mafia, exposing the organisation’s political links and implicating important officials of Italy’s leading political parties – allegedly including Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, himself – in dealings with Mafia bosses.
    Giuffrè, born in 1945, in the town of Caccamo in the province of Palermo, was trained as a teacher of agricultural sciences. However, like countless other men of the area, he also moved in Mafia circles, rising rapidly through the ranks to become the head of the mandamento – a district of three neighbouring Mafia families – of Caccamo.
    He knew everything there was to know about the Mafia. He had looked after the capo di capi , supreme Mafia boss, Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco, when he was on the run for four years in the 1980s and took refuge not far from Caccamo. Then, when Mafia boss, Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina was captured in 1993, he became the right-hand man of Bernardo Provenzano who took over from Riina and who, himself, was on the run for a remarkable four decades.
    After Riina’s arrest, Giuffrè was invited to join the directorate that ran the Sicilian Mafia. Other members, apart from Provenzano, were Salvatore Lo Piccolo from Palermo, Benedetto Spera from Belmonte Mezzagno, Salvatore Rinella from Trabia, Giuseppe Balsano from Monreale, Matteo Messina Denaro from Castelvetrano, Vincenzo Virga from Trapani and Andrea Manciaracina from Mazara del Vallo. This group only met infrequently, when it was necessary to make an important decison about Mafia business.
    Provenzano who, according to one Mafia insider had the brain of a chicken, but could ‘shoot like an angel’, ran the organisation very differently from Riina and the men who had gone before him. Whereas Riina’s method was to confront problems head on and, usually, with violence – assassinations or bomb attacks – Provenzano, known as ‘Binnu u Tratturi’ (Sicilian for ‘Bennie the Tractor’) because of his capacity for mowing people down, adopted a different approach. He approached Mafia affairs with a great deal more subtlety, favouring the gradual infiltration of public institutions and then beating the authorities from the