Mobbed Up
Jackie Presser’s High-Wire Life in the Teamsters, the Mafia, and the FBI
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1
Early Days
“Jackie was a bully.”
JACK KLEINMAN
On August 6, 1926, in Cleveland, Ohio, a frightened eighteen-year-old girl bore a healthy, hefty infant son. It was her first child, and she named him after her brother Jack. Asked at the hospital to fill out a birth certificate, she and the boy’s father gave their first names as Fannie and Joseph. They said their surname was Fayf. In careful longhand script, the birth certificate noted that he was a salesman, she a housewife, and that they lived on East Fifty-fifth Street.
None of it was true. There was no Mr. and Mrs. Fayf. The father was William Presser, a nineteen-year-old hatmaker, the mother Faye Friedman, daughter of a bootlegger and gambler. They weren’t married and had used false names not only to avoid embarrassment, but also to stick the hospital with the bill.
Their plump infant son, Jackie Presser, just a few hours old, didn’t realize he had just played a part in his first scam.
When Jackie was born, Faye Friedman and Bill Presser lived with their parents in Glenville, a middle-class, mostly Jewish neighborhood on Cleveland’s east side. Bill’s family lived in half of a relatively new two-family frame house, which had small patches of grass in front and in back. Bill, the oldest of Benjamin and Yetta Presser’s six children, was short and barrel-shaped, with a quiet, round face marked by dark, brooding eyebrows. Even in lean times, Bill looked well fed; years later Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa would nickname him the Plug.
Faye Friedman lived a few blocks away in a house that seemed huge compared to the three-bedroom home Presser’s family squeezed into. Built in 1920, the Friedman home had five bedrooms, two full bathrooms, a finished attic with three gabled windows facing the street, and a full basement complete with hidden compartments and a secret exit for quick escape. The basement was the most important room in the house. Faye’s father, Louis, had constructed an illegal distillery there that produced a steady stream of alcohol and income. Louis Friedman told people that he dealt in cattle, but dealing cards and selling booze more accurately described how he supported his five children.
Unlike Bill, the father of her child, Faye Friedman was outgoing and high-strung. Friends said she had a steam engine of a personality, thrusting her voice into laughs or screams, spending her prodigious energy on running the family or on gambling. Born in Austria-Hungary on May 8, 1908, she was sturdy and short, with blue eyes and blond hair. She inherited her father’s lust for gambling—horses, cards, gin rummy, anything. Bill Presser hated gambling; he considered it a waste of money, a sign of weakness, a sickness. Eventually, this sickness would help ruin the lives of two of Faye’s brothers.
Bill made hats, a hot, smelly, semiskilled trade that brought a steady paycheck to a young man with a new family. “It was hard work, because in those days everything was done by gas,” he recalled. “After a while you could pick up the hottest pot and you wouldn’t burn your hand—it was all calloused.” Hatmakers would heat a pot, or mold, over an open gas flame and then roll and press the unshaped hat around it, constantly brushing the nap of the material. “Oh, it was quite a bit of work and that was under tremendous heat,” he said.
The first year or so of Jackie’s life, a family member recalls, Jackie lived at a farm for orphans outside of Cleveland; he wasn’t reunited with his parents until they secured a place to live, reconciled with their parents, and got married. It was a fancy ceremony, complete with bridal attendants, tuxedoed groomsmen, and Faye dressed in a long white dress. Rabbi S. Goldman performed the service on January 15, 1928, seventeen months after Jackie was born.
In 1929, shortly after the stock market crashed, Bill declared bankruptcy and folded up the retail hat shop he operated on West Twenty-fifth Street. Like many other Glenville families during the early Depression, Bill and Faye squeezed by on little money. For a while, they lived with Bill’s parents and younger brothers and sisters. Jackie and his brother Marvin, two and a half years younger, slept in the same small bed.
For the next several years, Bill and Faye were often on the run, moving from house to house, apartment to apartment, beating landlords out of rent. They’d put down a month’s rent and never make another payment. Two or three months later, a sheriff’s deputy would take the streetcar out to the apartment and tack an eviction notice on the door. Between September 1931 and March 1942, Bill and Faye had at least thirteen different addresses. “I grew up in a neighborhood where I can remember where my father used to move into an apartment on the first of the month and on the twenty-ninth of the month we’d have to move out because he couldn’t pay the next month’s rent,” Jackie said. “It was a jungle out there.”
In October 1931, a month after enrolling Jackie in public kindergarten, his parents restored his real name by filing an affidavit with Cleveland’s bureau of vital statistics. This officially ended his double life, but it wouldn’t be the last time Jackie Presser operated under a secret identity.
Before the Depression, Glenville teemed with commerce, mostly small shops—kosher butchers, bakeries, barber shops, candy stores, delis, dry cleaners, drug stores—all clustered along East 105th Street, the crowded, narrow business artery that cut through the heart of the neighborhood. Residents could walk down East 105th and within a few steps hear the Old World sounds of Yiddish, smell fresh-baked rye bread, and, if they listened carefully, detect the clinking payouts of illegal penny-a-pull slot machines tucked in the back of candy stores.
At the time, Glenville was an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood, one of three in the city. The suburb of Cleveland Heights was where middle-class Jews lived. The Kinsman area, slightly poorer than Glenville, was the home of trade workers. Glenville was mostly populated by small-business owners, and it was politically less radical than Kinsman. Glenville’s anchor, dominating its social and intellectual affairs, was the Jewish Center. It was an impressive red brick building that contained not only a synagogue, but a swimming pool, a gymnasium with a basketball court, classrooms for the Cleveland Hebrew Schools, and a library. On Sunday mornings, the center’s lectures attracted hundreds of people, many from outside the neighborhood, who nourished themselves on speeches about Zionism, the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany, the trade-union movement, and local politics. Afterwards, they stayed around to socialize, cultivate business, and make friends.
Most of Glenville’s small shops survived the Depression; after all, people still had to buy bread and repair their shoes. Unemployed workers were in a more desperate situation. In fact, while waiting in lines at the Jewish Social Service Bureau for food handouts, out-of-work Glenville residents rioted after being told that the matzoh for Passover had run out. This was in 1933, the depth of the Depression. “We were growing up at a time when there was nothing, no hope for anything,” says Jack Kleinman, who grew up in Glenville and knew Jackie. “As kids, we played kick the can and buck buck, how many fingers up. As far as parents were concerned, it was a lot harder. Having children made your problems even worse. Lot of times, parents were so involved in trying to make a living that they didn’t have a handle on what their kids were doing.”
The newly married Pressers did frequently pick up and move, but they always stayed within the same few blocks in the heart of Glenville. The moves shouldn’t have disrupted young Jackie’s schooling at Miles Standish Elementary, but he was a poor student nonetheless. According to family members, Faye didn’t encourage Jackie in school, which was unusual for a Glenville parent. Many were the sons and daughters of undereducated immigrants, and as a rule they pushed their children to get an education and get ahead. Teachers were revered. Faye had ended her formal schooling at age seventeen when she dropped out of seventh grade at Miles Standish, just across the street from the Presser home. Bill got halfway through the eleventh grade at Glenville High School before dropping out in 1925.
During the thirties, Glenville High School enjoyed a reputation of academic excellence. Students took their studies seriously, competing for grades and honors. “It was a Jewish neighborhood, and parents held high aspirations for their children,” says Abba Schwartz, a retired Cleveland school administrator who grew up in Glenville. “And the teacher was always right. You were expected to perform.” Many Glenville graduates won Ivy League scholarships. The school’s median IQ, measured in the mid-thirties, was an astoundingly high 117. Years later, in one week in 1977, three Glenville graduates from this era were appointed to U.S. ambassadorships in Austria, Bali, and Costa Rica. It was that sort of student body.
Jackie didn’t fit into this culture of education and intellectual achievement. He and his family were outsiders. At age ten, he was still in the slow-learner section of second grade at Miles Standish. For the next five years, he was on the ungraded track at school, meaning that he wasn’t promoted from grade to grade each year. Instead, he was moved along as fast or as slow as he was able to learn.
Outside the classroom, on the playgrounds and the streets, Jackie excelled, foreshadowing the leadership he’d display later in life. He was the ringleader of a crew of first- and second-grade boys who roamed Miles Standish and its two huge new playgrounds. They’d enter the school and tear around its giant boiler room, hiding out, playing cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers. Jackie insisted on being the cop. Built like his father—squat, broad-shouldered, heavy—he was the leader, partly because he was the biggest, a friend says. “Jackie was in charge, I was his lieutenant,” says Sheldon Schecter, who left the neighborhood and became a successful lawyer, ran for Congress, and kept up ties to Jackie. “He was a husky kid then.”
Though he gave a dozen or more in-depth interviews throughout his life, Jackie was extremely secretive and revealed little about his early years. One relative who was close to him says that it’s because Jackie’s earliest memories were unpleasant. His mother, Faye, has been described as cold and unaffectionate; her younger sister, Millie, became Jackie’s surrogate mom, baby-sitting for him for several years. This relative also insists that Jackie eventually learned that he had been left in a foster home as an infant. The news was a shock, embarrassing him and making him unsure of his parents’ love.
Many of the Pressers refuse to discuss Jackie or his parents at all, sheltering their extraordinary family history. “The good stories are in my heart, and that’s where they’re going to stay,” Jackie’s brother, Marvin, explains. He says he doesn’t trust writers and brings up the time a Cleveland News reporter called him at home and asked, “Are you the son of William Presser?” “Yes, I am,” Marvin said. “I’d like to take you to lunch.” “What’s your name?” The reporter told him, and Marvin recognized it from the byline on a series of stories about the Teamsters Union that were critical of his father. “You stick that lunch up your ass,” Marvin advised.
When Jackie did talk of the old days, he often painted them in rosy hues. “I remember the streets I lived on had front porches and nobody carried a key for their door,” Jackie said. “I knew my neighbors. My mother had a swing on the porch, and my grandmother baked her own bread. Friday night was a big night for all of us for homemade soup of meats and stuff.” Jackie’s childhood friends and acquaintances also tell wistful stories about Depression-era Glenville, stories that clash with the harsher memories of their parents. Jackie and the neighborhood boys would play among the Cultural Gardens, then under construction by Work Projects Administration crews, who sweated with pick, shovel, and shears to grade lawns and mold shrubs and create ceremonial gardens that honored the various ethnic groups of Cleveland. The gardens were located along East Boulevard, which snaked through a narrow valley of woods and a stream that separated Glenville from a Slovakian neighborhood to the west.
In the summers, Jackie and the kids in the neighborhood sometimes watched baseball games between the Glenville ball players and the Catholic players from the Slovakian neighborhood across the boulevard. They played every Sunday afternoon, competing fiercely. “It was between the Jews and the Gentiles, a doubleheader,” Jack Kleinman recalls. “Lots of money was bet. When it was all over, there’d be fights. These were guys in their late teens, early twenties. I used to go down and sell them ice cream or cold pop.”
Bettors could find many outlets in Glenville. Every few blocks along East 105th Street, they could bet a horse or a ball game with bookies in the back of barbershops or in card rooms. In the established card rooms, you could sit down to a game of poker or stusch, a thirteen-card gambling game. Sol Tick ran a place in a room behind a barbershop on East 105th; the Kibbitzer’s Club was a few blocks away; the Log Cabin Club, at East 105th and Superior, was tucked into a tiny building that resembled its name. “Everybody knew it was there,” Kleinman says. “It was against the law, but anybody could walk in.”
Jackie’s grandfather, Louis Friedman, haunted the card rooms until he died of a heart attack in 1934. He was only forty-eight. His youngest son, Allen, only thirteen, was crushed. Allen was extremely close to his father and wanted to be a gambler and racketeer just like him. Allen’s fondest memories include helping his dad make moonshine in the basement still, stirring the hootch and preparing bottles.
Lou Friedman had been born in Hungary, where, according to family legend, he stole horses, painted them to hide characteristic markings, then sold them to unsuspecting customers. Years later in Cleveland, he was kidnapped by a rival bootleg gang while driving two big shipments of whiskey to Chicago. Lou’s wife, Theresa, called prominent racketeer Maxie Diamond for help. “All the racket guys loved my mother,” Allen says. Within a day, her husband was back, unharmed, his liquor intact, thanks to Maxie. “I had a lot of fun,” Lou Friedman said of his adventure.
Big bootleggers risked their lives, but Lou managed to outlive Prohibition. Another notorious Cleveland family, whose fortunes would intermingle with Jackie’s over the decades, wasn’t so fortunate.
One evening in October 1927, Big Joe Lonardo, the dark, three-hundred-pound don of Cleveland bootlegging, sauntered into a barbershop in the Italian area of Woodland. Big Joe was a flashy dresser who fancied diamond jewelry. This night, he wore diamond rings, cuff links, and a stickpin and carried several hundred dollars in a billfold. He and a younger brother, John, had come to meet the Porellos, newcomers from Sicily who were trying to move in on Lonardo’s wholesale corn-sugar cartel. The Lonardos illegally sold corn sugar, a key raw ingredient of bootleg booze, to hundreds of small stills throughout town.
The narrow barbershop served as a social center for the neighborhood, so Big Joe saw no reason for alarm when two men appeared from a back room. The men were on the Porello payroll, but they hadn’t come to discuss the corn-sugar market. They pulled out guns and fired a hail of bullets at Big Joe and his brother, stirring up a racket in the busy neighborhood. John Lonardo died instantly in the ambush. Big Joe started to chase his assailants and managed to stagger into the street, blood pumping from his chest. He pulled out a pistol, then collapsed. Cleveland’s first Mafia boss was dead.
Angelo, Big Joe’s oldest son, was fifteen when his father was murdered. Quickly, he and his cousins and uncles began a campaign of revenge. Soon, the murder of Big Joe had ignited Cleveland’s notorious Corn Sugar War. Before the war ended, seven Porello brothers and two more Lonardos were dead.
To take over the corn-sugar cartel from the Lonardos, the politically astute Porello family sought the blessing of the Mafia’s ruling council. On December 5, 1928, twenty-four Mafia powers, mostly from Chicago and New York City, met in a Cleveland hotel to discuss important national underworld matters, including, no doubt, the brutal Corn Sugar War. Although this Cleveland meeting never gained the widespread notoriety of the infamous 1957 Mafia convention in Apalachin, New York, it was the first known gathering of the ruling commission of the Mafia. Like the Apalachin convention, this meeting was rousted.
A Cleveland patrolman noticed a suspicious group of men entering the Hotel Statler at half-past four in the morning. “The men looked both ways and pulled their hats down as they entered the hotel,” the cop later testified. Police raided the hotel and nabbed twenty-three men and thirteen guns in one room. One of those swept up was Giuseppe Profaci, later known as Joe Profaci, who climbed to boss of the Brooklyn Mafia. Profaci had bad luck with these big Mob meetings—he was the only mafioso who was captured at both the Cleveland and Apalachin meetings.
On July 11, 1929, with Cleveland’s Corn Sugar War still raging, teenaged Angelo Lonardo drove a Lincoln sedan to one of the Porellos’ sugar warehouses, only a hundred feet from where his father had been slaughtered. In the car was his mother, Concetta, a fat woman in a black widow’s dress and thick round eyeglasses. She was the bait. Angelo sent a message to the warehouse manager, Black Sam Todaro, that Concetta wanted to talk to him. Todaro had worked for Big Joe and had arranged the fatal barbershop meeting. Angelo and his family believed that Black Sam had double-crossed them.
As widow of the slain don, Concetta was entitled to respect, so Todaro came out of the warehouse and walked over to the Lincoln. Angelo and a cousin pulled out pistols and fired, killing him with five slugs. Later, near Black Sam’s body, police found a playing card—the ace of spades, gangland’s calling card of death.
More than half a century later, Angelo Lonardo would be called Big Ange and serve as acting boss of the Cleveland Mafia. He would pocket money skimmed from Teamster-financed gambling casinos and would control some Teamsters jobs. He also would give Jackie Presser and the union hierarchy one giant headache after becoming an FBI informant and revealing how he and his Mafia friends had boosted Jackie’s career.
Jackie’s grandmother Theresa Friedman died a year after her husband Louis, leaving her thirteen-year-old youngest son, Allen, without parents. Allen’s sister Faye and her husband Bill Presser took him in, and he and Jackie became close friends. Over the next year, Bill and Faye and the boys wandered through Glenville, moving from Tacoma Avenue to Adams Avenue to East Ninety-ninth Street, all within ten months. Allen resented the moves, his school, his life, and especially the fact that his parents had died. He felt abandoned and angry, and he lashed out with his fists. “I beat up on kids,” he admits. “Mothers wouldn’t let me hang out with their daughters.”
A handsome athletic kid, Allen was soon carrying two hundred pounds on a muscular 5′10″ frame. By age nineteen, he had made a career choice. “I wanted to be a crook and racketeer, collect debts for people,” he says. He and Jackie, only five years apart, were as close as brothers. Fearless, good-looking Uncle Allen was Jackie’s adolescent idol. “He looked up to me like I was the sun, moon, and the stars,” Allen says. Big and slow in school, influenced by his increasingly violent uncle, Jackie Presser had turned into a schoolyard bully.
Jack Kleinman, a year older than Jackie, remembers a fight they had at elementary school. “Jackie was a bully,” Kleinman affirms. “He was messing around with one of the young girls there or … throwing a ball real hard at someone.” They squared off on the playground. Kleinman had the advantage of age and height, but Jackie outweighed him substantially. “He ended up with a bloody nose, and I had a chipped tooth or something,” Kleinman says. “I don’t know if he beat me up or I beat him up. We had some tussles.”
Meanwhile, Bill Presser moved from job to job. He handled cattle, he worked in a window-cleaning company run by his father. By the time Jackie was eight or nine, he ran his own dry-cleaning shop. According to one report, a racketeer tried to shake him down, and Bill picked up a baseball bat and chased him out. Word of the incident got around, and it brought the Plug his first organizing job. A group of small-business owners asked him for help. Presser agreed and ended up persuading the owners and employees of several dozen dry cleaners to band together into an association and to halt a vicious price-cutting war among themselves.
In becoming an organizer, Bill Presser was joining a noble calling in Glenville and in working-class neighborhoods throughout the city. Glenville’s Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, the spellbinding orator and international Zionist leader, advocated trade unions as a way to settle strife and to achieve justice for workers. In fact, at a 1919 address given at Public Square, Cleveland’s downtown nerve center, Rabbi Silver savaged the hasty move toward nonunion shops by factories and industrialists right after World War I. A handsome man with a full mouth, thick eyebrows, and dark, intense eyes that flashed behind wire-rimmed spectacles, Rabbi Silver championed the closed shop in sermons and speeches, making it both a religious and social issue.
If his family had been in the habit of going to temple, Bill Presser would have cheered such sermons. His mother, Yetta, had organized garment workers in New York at the turn of the century and, according to family legend, had risked her safety to fight for decent wages and working conditions. Company goons once bashed her in the face during a strike, Bill Presser recalled: “I was one of the very fortunate people who had a mother who had come to this country when she was fifteen years old, by herself, and was an advocate of organization.… She had to support herself and became a member of the Ladies Garment Workers of New York City. Several months later, she was one of the women who led a strike, and of course she carried a scar across her head and forehead for the rest of her life. As I grew up, my mother taught me many things by talking to me about the cause of working people and their problems. I listened, and as I grew older, that became a part of my life.”
Yetta Presser wasn’t alone in her beliefs. Most of her neighbors had come from Poland, Russia, and other parts of Eastern Europe, fleeing czarist Russia and the pogroms. Russia had imposed heavy fines for evading military service and began denying Jews the right to education, a blow to their identity. As a result, these newcomers hated the czar and were sympathetic to the ideas of socialism and collective bargaining.
But Bill Presser, the labor organizer, didn’t share the progressive or even liberal beliefs commonly accepted as the bedrock of the labor movement. He was different, a Republican, a small businessman who hated Socialists. If someone interfered with his livelihood or his union position, he felt justified in fighting back with illegal tactics.
Presser told the story of how he and other union officials in the thirties blew up a temporary recruiting shack that the Communist party had erected in the center of town. “Well, there was a time when the Communists had a building on Public Square in Cleveland, many many many years ago, to recruit people to join the Communist party. They searched for members, [people] who had worked and were laid off and they couldn’t make a living. The promise to them was that if you join our party we will find you work, we will see that you don’t go hungry. Hungry people, if they are hungry enough, will join anything. They were doing a tremendous business.… There was a steady stream coming in the front door and walking out the back door. That’s how fast they were recruiting. Well, there were a number of labor unions at that time that were being badly hurt by it. We decided to do something about it.
“So this clearing hall for communism … just fell down! And we wouldn’t help them put it up again.… The police and everyone was there, watching it fall down. That was the end of that.”
He and his friends had just boldly blown it up. Such tactics would always serve him well.
2
The Rackets
“Bill Presser told them, ‘You better do what I say or my brother-in-law will kill you.’”
ALLEN FRIEDMAN ON HOW THEY SHOOK DOWN BUSINESSES
William G. Jones, tough and twenty-one, worked at Carley’s Dry Cleaning. It was 1938, and he was happy to have a job, even though he earned only about ten dollars a week. Cleveland’s economy, battered by the Depression, was still a couple of years away from being kicked into recovery by the war in Europe.
Bill Jones handled all the chores for owner Ira Carley: he pressed clothes; he swept floors; he delivered clean laundry from the plant on busy Carnegie Avenue to the two branch stores in suburban Lakewood and Cleveland Heights. As Ira Carley got more business, Jones had a tougher time at work. Carley’s success attracted the attention of both the International Association of Cleaning and Dye Houseworkers and a stocky, unscrupulous business agent named Bill Presser.
Carley’s troubles had started a year or so earlier when he moved his dry-cleaning business to Cleveland from New York. He boldly cut prices and began competing fiercely with the seventeen hundred other dry cleaners in the county. Soon, he was visited by men from the Dry Cleaners Association who demanded that he join their group, pay dues, and illegally fix his prices to those set by their association.
It would have been so easy, for all parties, if Carley had just gone along, but he refused. And the association had to get rough with him.
On Wednesday, December 28, 1938, Bill Jones was unloading laundry from a truck at the Lakewood shop when he encountered one of the association’s toughs, Ray G. Meyers, who was connected to Bill Presser and the dry-cleaners association. Three of Meyers’s men were picketing the front of the cleaner, carrying banners that claimed the store was unfair to organized labor. Ray Meyers, business agent with the International Association of Cleaning and Dye Houseworkers, saw Jones unloading the clean clothes.
“What’s the idea? You can’t deliver here!” he yelled out.
“Who’s going to stop me?” Jones shot back.
Ira Carley came out and helped his delivery man bring the dry cleaning safely inside. As Jones headed back to the truck, Meyers threatened him.
“You’re going to get your head opened,” the business agent said.
Jones drove off. The next day, the toughs carried through on the threat. It was lunchtime, and Jones and two other Carley workers, Frank Greco and Julia Bejda, went to a diner next door to the main plant on Carnegie. About two dozen men shuffled in and made a point of watching the three eat lunch. Jones recognized some of the men as picketers who had been stationed for days outside the plant.
The gang left the diner a few minutes later. After lunch, as Bill, Frank, and Julia traveled the thirty feet back to the plant, one of the picketers ran up and smashed Jones in the head. Others jumped him and beat him. The three dry-cleaning workers, terrified, ran to the shop.
“Get the girl, too!” yelled one of the thugs.
Just inside the plant, a Cleveland cop, on hand to quell picket-line flare-ups, stepped up. Bill Jones told him what had happened, took him outside, and pointed to the man who had attacked him first. The policeman grabbed the man. Suddenly, from cars parked on the street, dozens of picketers sprang out and surrounded Jones and the cop and his captive. The gang shoved the cop, pulling their friend free. He ran across the street, jumped into a car, and tore off.
This same scene—but with a cast of different workers, unions, and tough guys—was played out repeatedly in the thirties, throughout Cleveland and throughout the country. Window glaziers, dry cleaners, carpenters, and other craftsmen bonded into associations and quasi-unions backed by men who possessed the charisma, cunning, and muscle to persuade others to break laws and bust heads for the promise of a sweeter payday.
Presser and many others, however, ran labor rackets that were simply organizations for extortion and price-fixing. His Dry Cleaners Association was hardly a union. It was made up mostly of owners of small dry-cleaning businesses—Presser himself had owned a shop—who banded together and agreed to fix their prices, often substantially higher than the fair market rate. Then they or their musclemen would approach other dry cleaners and insist they join the association, pay regular dues, and raise their prices. If an owner didn’t go along, he’d soon need new windows or first aid. “The labor movement when I started had no rules, no laws, and was a hit-and-miss operation based on jungle tactics,” Presser once said.
There’s nothing to suggest that Presser and the Dry Cleaners Association were concerned with the wages and working conditions of Carley’s employees. Irene Rako, who started working for Carley in November 1938, remembers the young men picketing in front of the plant; she even kidded with them on her way in and out of work. But never did anyone from the association ask her to join a union or sign a pledge card or come to an organizing meeting—even though she was unhappy with her $9.80 weekly wage and was willing to join a union.
Carley fought Presser’s harassment. He hired lawyers who sued Bill Presser, the Dry Cleaners Association, its business agents, and its locals. They complained that picketers threatened Carley’s customers, falsely claimed a strike was going on, and prevented trucks from delivering coal to the plant. A judge issued a restraining order forbidding Presser, picketers, or anyone in the association from coming too close to Carley’s stores. A restraining order is a legal nicety in tough times; it didn’t hamper men like Bill Presser. They knew there were other, more creative ways besides a picket line to bring pressure on a balky owner.
Several times during Irene Rako’s first year of employment at Carley’s Cleveland Heights shop, she came to work and saw shattered glass and boarded windows and inhaled the noxious fumes of homemade stink bombs, which were quickly becoming the popular organizing tool of the day. “The smell was terrible,” she says. “People came for their clothes and they stunk. You couldn’t get that smell out.” She switched to a job at the main plant, met Bill Jones, and married him. The stink bombs kept coming, and Carley eventually gave up. “They drove him out of business,” Irene Rako says.
There were some famous veterans of those dry-cleaning battles, Allen Friedman recalls. Not only Bill Presser, but Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno and Babe Salupo worked as bombers, he said. Fratianno went on to become a member of the Los Angeles Mafia ten years later, taking on part-time duties as executioner. He personally murdered five men and took part in the slaying of several others. Salupo, arrested numerous times, was convicted of blackmailing prostitutes and imprisoned in Ohio in 1936.
Labor rackets flourished and were even reluctantly tolerated in the thirties. One reason was the ambiguity swirling around labor’s bout with management. At the time, many blue-chip corporations were interfering with the legitimate demands of labor unions in ways just as ferocious and unethical as those of the racketeers. In 1936 alone, American corporations spent $80 million on provocateurs, labor spies, and anti-union thugs, as well as millions more for private security forces. Some labor organizers believed this behavior justified their own questionable tactics. In a given conflict, the working public couldn’t always figure out whose hands were cleaner.
Bill Presser and the labor racketeers came striding into this gray area. Labor racketeers didn’t target steel mills and auto factories and foundries, the giant pools of workers who truly needed the protection of a collective-bargaining agreement. Racketeers picked on small, vulnerable mom-and-pop operations such as dry cleaners, taverns, and bakeries. When a business agent such as Bill Presser made his move, there was little a small-business owner could do to combat the coercion. He or she could complain to the police, but it was usually a waste of time. Police did little to investigate the labor shakedowns and picket-line violence that flared up all over Cleveland.
The situation was made clear to a frustrated Cuyahoga County grand jury seated in 1933 that tried to take a serious look at the problem. The grand jury spent days listening to evidence about various crimes, but none of the presentations pertained to the rash of violence sweeping across the city’s businesses. The grand jury, basically a passive body, learned only what an assistant county prosecutor presented. The prosecutor, in turn, depended on police officers for investigation, suspects, and statements. The police, however, were concentrating on other crimes.
In a scathing report, the grand-jury foreman complained that his fellow jurors “had to indict a man who confessed that while ‘squirrel drunk’ he took off a shoe and smashed four plate-glass windows in a grocery store. Hundreds of windows in Cleveland have been broken by ruthless racketeers this year, but this drunk was the sole window-smasher brought before the grand jury—and he was not a racketeer.” It was the perfect climate for Bill Presser’s growing operation.
Eliot Ness didn’t look like a gangbuster when he arrived in Cleveland. He was slender, six feet tall, and sported fine double-breasted blue suits cut in the current fashion. He made a sharp contrast to the rough-hewn, beefy, working-class Cleveland police force. A graduate of the prestigious University of Chicago, the boyish-looking Ness was only thirty-two years old when he was appointed Cleveland’s safety director, put in charge of the police and fire departments, and given sweeping powers to do whatever necessary to keep the city safe. He was a celebrity long before the television series “The Untouchables” made him a national pop hero. In the thirties, people across the country knew how he battled notorious mobster Al Capone with his hand-picked crew of untouchables, honest agents impervious to bribery and corruption. After the repeal of Prohibition, Ness moved to the Treasury Department’s Alcohol Tax Unit in Cincinnati to fight backwoods illegal moonshiners. Urbane and ambitious, Ness came to Cleveland in 1935, hired by Mayor Harold H. Burton in a stroke of political genius. Ness was just the right tonic for Cleveland. The city’s economy, which relied heavily on steel making and iron casting, was hit harder than most other cities by the Depression. Its police department was reeling from exposés in the city’s fiercely competitive newspapers about cops and councilmen on the take who protected open gambling games and illegal nightspots. Hungry for a hero, reporters chronicled Ness’s every step, creating a figure of godlike proportions.
Ness and his attractive wife dove into the city’s social circuit. They lived alone in a large boathouse on Clifton Lagoon in Lakewood, an older suburb known for its three-mile stretch of elegant homes along the shores of Lake Erie. Ness wasn’t a prude. He liked to take a drink and he liked to take late-night boat rides with friends, motoring along the calm, warm summer waters of the lake. His assignment was to take on corrupt cops, syndicate gambling, and labor racketeering—basically clean up the town. As he jumped into the task, the gangsters, Maxie Diamond included, watched warily from the sidelines.
Diamond was close to the Presser family, having rescued Faye Presser’s brother Louis after he was kidnapped by the rival gang of bootleggers. Like Faye’s father, Diamond had been born in Russia, in 1902. He was slim, about 5′8″ and 140 pounds, a flashy dresser, and a graduate of the 105 Gang, named after East 105th Street, the narrow Glenville street with a bookie or a gambling joint on nearly every block. Diamond was described by newspapers as Cleveland’s number-one racketeer, but it didn’t seem to bother him. Racketeering operated so openly that the label wasn’t considered a stigma. In fact, Diamond was helped by the notoriety. It made it easier to shake down shop owners or to prevent rivals from moving in on his illegal operations. Racketeers moved about so boldly and had so much influence with politicians that when passing such gangsters on the sidewalks, many policemen felt obligated to tip their hats.
A few months after Ness took office, Diamond still felt comfortable enough to saunter into the city’s central police headquarters and, in an impromptu interview with a reporter, praise Ness for his honesty. Diamond allowed as how he was in the building to see about a real-estate deal. “Dressed like an Esquire fashion picture in a well-pressed brown suit, a dark brown snap-brimmed hat, and a dashing checked tan top coat, Diamond puffed on a long black cigar and spoke of Ness,” the reporter’s story read. “I have never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ness, but I’d certainly like to,” Diamond said.
Diamond, only thirty-nine, took off his hat and rubbed a temple, showing a few strands of silver among his black hair. “I know Mr. Ness is a swell guy because you can’t buy him either for a cigar or any amount of cash,” Diamond said. “All I know about him is what I’ve read, but I know he’s an honest man.” And how does he like Mayor Burton’s administration? Diamond was asked. “It makes no difference to me,” he replied. “I’ve never made a nickel off any of the mayors.… Some of the boys have had favors and have made some change by their connections with politicians, but I have never.”
“What politicians?” he was asked. Diamond smiled and strolled away.
Diamond was associated with Bill Presser through the laundry rackets. Diamond also operated several large, plush, illegal gambling clubs in and around Cleveland. He was one level down from the top of the Cleveland syndicate, which was dominated by four partners who went on to build Las Vegas: Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, Louis Rothkopf, and Samuel A. Tucker. Together they ran laundries, casinos, and nightclubs.
Ness started his clean-up campaign in earnest in 1936. He targeted the obvious, the gangsters from Little Italy—the Mayfield Road Gang, the newspapers called them—police characters Angelo “Big Ange” Lonardo, George “King” Angersola, Angelo Sciria, and their cohorts in the numbers rackets like Milton “Maishe” Rockman. Like most people, Ness focused his attention on flashy headline grabbers like Maxie Diamond and Shondor Birns, not yet realizing who the secret powers of the underworld really were. Meanwhile, these truly powerful men profited silently, out of sight, grateful for the distraction.
The elusive Moe Dalitz, one of the top four, was called the first among equals of the Cleveland syndicate. His parents owned Varsity Laundry in Detroit, which served University of Michigan students. Early on, Dalitz was connected with Detroit’s infamous Purple Gang, which had come into power in the early twenties when laundry owners hired gang members to protect them from labor organizers. “Realizing the possibilities, the gang set up their own racket and forced anyone desiring to operate a laundry to join and pay ‘dues’ of up to a thousand dollars a week. It became necessary to murder a few holdouts,” according to Mob expert Hank Messick.
As he had done in Detroit, Dalitz built a laundry empire in Cleveland. In December 1932, Dalitz, Kleinman, and the others had formed Buckeye Enterprises Company, the first formal arrangement between the Jewish Cleveland syndicate and the Mayfield Road Gang, a group of first- and second-generation Italians who would later be called the Cleveland Mafia—Frank and Anthony Milano, Big Al Polizzi, John Angersola, and others. This innovative arrangement was successful, and there would be many more like it, making it easier for Bill Presser to coexist with the Mafia in later decades. Over the years, Buckeye split, changed names, and resurfaced as Buckeye Cigarette Service, then as Buckeye Vending, owned by Maishe Rockman, Mafia don John Scalish, and others.
To tackle the Cleveland mobsters, Ness used the techniques that had helped him nail the Capone gang in Chicago. He put together a cadre of supposedly untouchable enforcers, then employed wiretaps and paid informants to gather evidence. In 1939, he and his men had enough evidence to go before a grand jury and get indictments on twenty-three numbers racketeers, including Big Ange Lonardo, Maishe Rockman, John and George Angersola, Chuck Polizzi, and Shondor Birns. The grand jury sealed the indictments so investigators could dig up more evidence.
It had been a long investigation, and Ness had to feel gratified. His top investigator, Lieutenant Ernest Molnar, had worked with him every step of the way. Molnar was part of Ness’s Cleveland untouchables, privy to every move and strategy. But Ness had a mysterious blind spot when it came to Molnar. Federal agents remember Molnar coming far outside his city district to interfere with raids on bootleggers and gambling games. With uncannily accurate tips, the lieutenant made impressive arrests as well. But Ness should have recognized that Molnar was going after certain gangsters while protecting their rivals.
Just as the secret indictments were about to be unsealed, the Angersolas, Chuck Polizzi, and several others fled the country aboard the Wood Duck, a yacht owned by Mickey McBride, future owner of the Cleveland Browns and the city’s Yellow Cab Company. Molnar had tipped them off, and they made their way across Lake Erie, up the St. Lawrence River, and eventually down to Miami Beach. Angelo Lonardo, Maishe Rockman, and others were arrested.
The underworld wise guys had to appreciate the irony: Ness, the college-educated gangbuster, had a bent cop as his right-hand man. Eight years later, a new Cleveland safety director conducted an investigation that nailed Molnar on numerous counts of bribery. He was sentenced to sixty-six years but served only four.
Meanwhile, grand juries were looking into labor racketeering and trying to call as witnesses the victims of shakedowns, blackmail, widespread coercion, and violence. It was frustrating. The victims were terrified and wouldn’t testify. Of course, the racketeers pleaded the Fifth Amendment and refused to incriminate themselves when called to the top-secret proceedings.
At first, some city leaders thought Ness could make a difference. But it turned out to be wishful thinking. “Mr. Ness and the county prosecutor’s office have made a marvelous beginning in this war against rackets,” said grand-jury foreman Cyril O’Neil in 1937. But he complained that the public wasn’t supporting the crusade strongly enough. “Few people realize the nature of this evil and the damage done by those unprincipled racketeers whose dictatorship is robbing union labor of the right to work and exacting tribute not only from the consumer but from their own organizations as well. No one but a robber has to make a living by threats and coercion, and unless union members want this stigma attached to them, it is their duty to help rid Cleveland of those dishonest business agents and others connected with them who defy all civil and moral codes in their conquest of power.”
Indictments were rarely returned.