Ken Eto

T

his week’s story begins when Executive Order 9066 was signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942.  This order gave US Military Commanders the right to order people of Japanese descent out of the so called exclusion zones. The zones included the whole West Coast from Mexico to Canada.  The US Justice Department opened 27 Concentration camps.  Japanese were not the only ones held in these camps there were Chinese, Eskimo's and other Asians also held against their will.  The US also had other countries deport its Japanese residents to these camps from places like Mexico and Peru.

My Father and my family were some of these held in the camps.  My Father was held in the Minidoka War Concentration Center in Idaho along with another Japanese American named Ken Eto.   What does this have to do with the Mafia?  Stay with me and you will find out. Ken Eto was born in Livingston, California on October 19th 1919 and his father had become a minister because he had witnessed the toll that Gambling had taken on the Japanese Railroad workers.  

I’ve read in the past where people have cited a couple of early arrest as proof that Ken was a criminal. The arrests were for being Japanese or breaking Curfew for a Japanese in Tacoma, Washington. He was soon sent to Minidoka until the US decided that the Japanese Americans were not a threat.

Ken Eto was very intelligent and high school bored him, so he dropped out.  He would never attend another day in school and the ministry was not for him.  It was not until the US decided to make criminals out of all the Japanese Americans that Ken learned how to Gamble.  It has been said that he learned how to play craps on a train to the camp and once there he became a skilled poker player.  After he was released from the Camp he drifted to Montana where he was involved in games of chance and he was referred to as Montana Joe.  He soon made his way to Chicago where a lot of relocated Japanese including my father made their new home.  Once in Chicago his gambling skill attracted the attention of the only people who matter in Chicago gambling and that is the Outfit. Chicago has always been on the cutting edge of racial equality, meaning they worked with a number of ethnic groups and leaders.  Murray Humphreys, known as Einstein was Welsh but he was the Outfits Corruption specialist.  Gus Alex, a Greek, help run the Outfit when Joey Doves was away.  Jake Guzik a Jew was the man who could move money. The outfit list of non Italians is huge and that is why they controlled the rackets in Chicago for so long.  Ross Prio the Outfits North Side Boss took an interest in Ken Eto. Ken Eto began to run some small card games and he was bringing in cash.  It would not be until the mid fifties that he would hit his stride.  He began to work with the Outfit to take over the Bolita from Puerto Rican operators.  Bolita is a Spanish game that refers to 100 little balls with numbers placed in a bag and then picking 3 balls at random.  The three numbers are the winning numbers.  In later years the winning number was the handle or amount of money taken in by horse parlors. Bolita is a poor mans lottery, so It is like Numbers in New York or Bolito in Tampa that the Cubans played.  It was a huge money maker for the Mafia that DutchShultz first realised in New York when he took it over from Black Policy Banks.  In 1958 Ken set up a Puerto Rican operator who refused an offer by Fifi Buccieri to join his Outfit run game.  The operator was soon chopped up the Angelo "The Hook" LaPietra and his brother Jimmy "the Lapper"

Ken then began to work with Black Policy Bosses so he could consolidate their numbers games for the Outfit.  He was bringing in so much cash that he was paying the police over 3,000 a week in payoffs to protect his game.  

He also started working with Black Street gang leaders to expand his business, this would prove very lucrative.  During the 1960's he set up three more rivals to the Outfits Bolita games for execution.  That was it and the Outfit would enjoy years of monopoly in the gambling game. Ken was able to bring in between 150 and 200k a week from his numbers game.  He also ran a number of floating games but he did not stop there.  He muscled his way into the food purveying business by taking over a company named Caliendo which had a meat plant. He used threats and intimidation to run the business and when that would not work he used cash to payoff people.  He would be on site in the plant with a white butchers smock but he was no butcher he was the boss or just Joe as he was called by the workers.  The FBI began to target the business because it was illegal for anyone with a felony conviction to run a Federally licensed meat plant. Caliendo also lost money on the books but purchased beef from all over far exceeding its sales.

Ken moved the business and changed its name to Taco Si to keep it going after the FBI investigated.  

Ken had his hands in many criminal enterprises by the 1980's and the FBI had its eyes on him.  He was soon busted on a gambling charge but he kept his mouth shut and reported to his new Boss Vince Solano who took over after Ross Prio passed away.  Ross believed in Ken but Vince did not have much faith in Ken and he knew Ken was there when he strangled a Bolita rival to death in the 50.s.  Vince sought and was given permission to kill Ken after he pled guilty to gambling charges. Vince set up a meeting with Ken at their usual meeting place IHOP.  When Ken parked Vince was already in the parking lot and he asked to take a walk talk.  Vince asked about his plea and then told Ken to appeal it.  He then told Ken that Rush Street crew member Johnny Gattuso wanted to buy a Pizzeria and that he knew Ken's wife had a shuttered cocktail lounge for sale. He told him to charge between 50 and 60 thousand for the lounge and that Jay Campise would be Johnny's partner.  Vince then said something that put Ken on edge he told him not to worry about getting the cash because he would handle it.  Vince had burned him on a nightclub deal in the past by having him sign over a lease and then never paying him.

On February 10 1983 Ken was instructed to meet two members his crew to be taken to a meeting with Vince Solano.  This came after 30 plus years of loyal service to the Outfit and after he had brought in millions from street gambling.    They called him and asked him to meet them at his closed lounge at 8pm, when he arrived he was with a friend so they told him he was late and they would arrange another meeting.  Ken was told to meet Jay Campise and Johnny Gattuso to be taken to dinner with Vince Solano.  Ken smelled a rat right away because in the 30 years of knowing Vince he had never been asked to dinner.  He showered and put on his best suit, he told his wife where his life insurance was located and then he told her this maybe the last dinner I have.  Ken had to go because to not go when sent for was automatic death.  He arrived at the American Legion hall parking lot and he spotted Jay and Johnny waiting for him.  They walked over and got into his car and instructed him to drive to a nearby Italian restaurant near the train tracks.  When they arrived at the place they told him to park near the side of the building and right after he parked, he heard a loud bang followed by a massive blow to the back of his head.  He would hear a couple more and then lose consciousness when he awoke he was a bloody mess when he stumbled into a nearby pharmacy and asked for help.

The two men had made a huge mistake by using sub loads in the 22.cal plus a silencer,  A sub load is a shell with some of the powder taken out so it is not as load.  The problem is that combined with a silencer which slows the bullet down as gasses escape so the sound is much lower the bullets did have enough velocity to pierce the skull.

Ken would now become a government witness against the Outfit and the two hitters would pay with their lives. They became trunk music and Ken Eto would live a long life with a new name in Georgia.

The end of an Era in Los Angeles Gangland

The End of Post WWII Gangster Era in Los Angeles

“There are no happy endings in the life.” - Joseph "Joe Campy" Campenella


The Life is what being a wiseguy or being in Organized Crime is called.  Very few men involved in The Life ever live out a full life.  The Life is hard, treacherous and stressful.  Men in The Life never take care of themselves and are frequently locked up.  I’ve seen it so many times in my life.  A guy does very well, lives a super star life and then when he is older he loses it all and there is no way for him to get it back.  

Mickey’s not-so-happy ending

Mickey Cohen lived The Life. He bought a home in Brentwood for forty thousand dollars and then spent forty nine thousand in renovations.  He spent eight hundred dollars a year on shoes. He bought two new Cadillacs a year. All money that legally he should have paid the IRS. So he did his first prison stint in about four years.  Mickey came out and opened up a plant business that supplied real and plastic plants to restaurants.  The scam?  Mickey would have some of his guys walk into places and tell them they needed his plants at say 200 a month. This was a way to get his hooks into restaurants and clubs. He would also continue his bookmaking business.  The house was gone and so was his wife, so Mickey moved into a small apartment.  He had it redone with new carpets, floors and closets. Then Mickey came up with a brilliant scam. The reporters had loved him because he sold papers every time he was on the front page they flew off the racks.  Mickey was a known name and he found that he could use this infamy.  He started working on a piece about himself with a screenwriter who had written the original Scarface.  He started hitting up anyone rich or poor to buy a piece of his life story. He would collect upwards of four hundred thousand dollars. This was working out very well for Mickey until the night of December 2, 1959 at Rondelli’s, when Jack Whalen was murdered.  Mickey and his friends were put on trial.  Luckily for him, they were acquitted.  However, Mickey had no time to celebrate because the IRS came down on him again.  They proved he was guilty of not paying his taxes again and he was sent to Alcatraz, this time for 15 years.  He was there a short time when he was released on an appeal bond but this freedom did not last long.  The appeal was rejected and he was back in Alcatraz. Alcatraz was closed and he was relocated to a Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was hit in the head with a pipe and partially paralyzed.  After Mickey was home from his prison sentences and in a wheelchair, he lived in an apartment. This time there would be no long nights at clubs or thousand dollar dinners with movie stars. This was the same man who years earlier had raised a million dollars for the state of Israel and then claimed the ship carrying the arms was “lost at sea.” The same man who once had hundreds of bookies paying him weekly.   When Mickey died from stomach cancer in 1976 he was worth a total of three thousand dollars. So much for being the King of the Sunset Strip.

The Sica Brothers

Joe “JS” , Alfred “Fred” , Angelo and Frank Sica.  These were the real faces of Organized Crime power in LA.  Nobody writes about them and they are not in movies.  JS gave many a gangsters his start and right now one of the top guys in  the Boston Cosa Nostra is a Sica taught man. They were part of LA’s Underworld from the 1940’s until the 1990’s when JS passed. The Sica Brothers had long worked out of the Formosa Cafe.  They were still running their empire from their ranch in the Valley all the way to Northern California in the shadows.They Shylocked, Booked sports, ran dope and anything else that made them cash.  The Cosa Nostra had not missed a step when Dragna died in 1956.  They would keep it going till today. This I will get into in future blogs

The LA Family tried for many years to get a casino but had failed. Jack Dragna was a good boss, but he was complacent.  He did not have the drive to get into a casino, he wanted the cash now, not long term. The others did not have what it took to lead the family into these lucrative rackets. They would come close.  Pete Milano would almost get into the Tallyho, Jimmy Frattiano just missed getting into a counting room of his own. Jack Dragna had been close to Benny Benion the Dallas gambling kingpin and later Casino owner but he never did do anything but hit him up for cash.

The Mickey Mouse Mafia is what the LAPD called the LA Family, the press picked up on this and ran with it.  The LAPD likes to pat themselves on the back and claim the Gangster Squad was the reason the Cosa Nostra never grew like it did back east.  The truth though was simple.  The family had no talent pool to pull from.  The Families back east had a large population of Italian immigrants to pull talent from. If you look back on who was in the LA Family everyone was from back East.  If you follow the Cosa Nostra now, you can see that even in New York they have problems today.  They do not have the pool of qualified hoods to pull from.  The Commission realized the pool was small and at the behest of Carmine Persico and John Gotti they decided to okay making guys who were not 100% Italian. This was in the early 80’s.  The two bosses did this mainly so that their sons could join the life and take over for them. The other families gladly welcomed it because they could fill their depleted ranks.


Happier Endings

There is no denying that the men who fought against the gangsters were brave and put their lives on the line for what they felt was right. Those men from LAPD who chased the gangsters during the time after the war would end up much better than the famous gangsters they chased.  One example is Jerry Wooters, the cop who had fed info to Jack Whalen.  After Jack met his end, Jerry soon left the force and started a career in sales. He did very well and moved his family to Newport Beach where he would die a wealthy man.

Jack O'Mara went from the LAPD right to leading the large Security force at Santa Anita Racetrack.  He would live a long fruitful life with his wife and kids. He would laugh about the old stories of dealing with gangsters.  One he often recalled was taking Marshal Caifano up to Coldwater Canyon where he explained to him why he did not want to be in LA.  Marshal was “the man” in  Las Vegas for a while but he ended up in exile in Florida.

Lindo "Jaco" Giacopuzzi was the one Italian on the squad who could speak Italian.  Lindo became rich and successful like Jerry Wooters.  He would build a huge shopping center and he also moved to Newport Beach.


This ends the Gangster era of post World War Two Los Angeles.
Fifty eight murders and only two of those would ever result in people going to prison.

Special Holiday Edition Post! St. Valentine's Day Massacre

"Only Capone kills like that," Bugs Moran 1929

The Saint Valentines Day Massacre

This is the name given to the murder of seven men from Chicago’s North Side Irish gang.

THE BEEF.

Throughout the 1920's, The Irish Gang - headed by leader Dion O’Bannion and Bugs Moran, battled with Al Capone for control of Chicago’s illegal businesses.  Dion was killed in his flower shop by Capone’s men on  November 10, 1924. Bugs assumed control of the gang after his murder.  Bugs continued to hijack Capone’s liquor shipments and shoot his men.

One of the most spectacular attempts on Al Capone came when Moran and his associates drove six cars past a hotel in Cicero, Illinois, where Capone and his associates were having lunch, and showered the building with more than 1,000 bullets.  Al Capone had enough, so he had one of his top killers "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn aka Vincenzo Antonio Gibaldi devise a plan.  Vincenzo took the name Jack Mcgurn when he was younger because he was a boxer, and an Irish boxer was given better fights than an Italian boxer.

THE PLAN.

Capone and his family left for their home in Florida weeks before the planned hit so that he would have a rock solid alibi.  Jack McGurn had two brothers, Harry and Phil Keywell (from Detroit's Purple Gang), rent a room at a boarding house conveniently located across the street from Bugs Moran’s gang's headquarters.  The headquarters were in a large garage behind the offices of S.M.C. Cartage Company at 2122 North Clark Street. The two brothers would keep watch, and get word to the hit team when they saw Bugs Moran enter the building.  They had a bootlegger that was known to Bugs offer a shipment of good whiskey to him on Valentine’s day. The plan worked well.  Five men from Bugs’ gang were waiting for the shipment and their boss to arrive.  There was a mechanic and an optician who considered himself a doctor.  Also there along with the men was a German Shepherd named Highball.   The brothers called the hit team and sent the message: Bugs had arrived.


THE HIT.

This is what is known.  A car parked in the rear.  Two men wearing trench coats came out of the car.  A police car pulled in front of the garage, and two “officers” (who were actually hoods dressed up like officers)  made their way inside the garage.  The two “policemen” lined up the seven men inside the headquarters.  They were all forced to stand facing a brick wall. The other two men from the car parked in the rear now joined the two “policemen”.  They each drew a Thompson Sub Machine Gun from under their coats.  One had a twenty round "stick" magazine and the other a fifty round "drum" magazine.  They used the stick because the drums were prone to jamming.  The police hoods -one armed with a shotgun and the other with a colt 45 automatic pistol - began to fire at the same time as the machine guns.  Seventy shots were fired in seconds.  At least two shotgun shells were found at the scene and the rest were 45 caliber cases.  When the shooting stopped, the seven men were down in a huge pool of blood.  Highball was howling in a high pitched cry.  The men in the trench coats hid the Tommy Guns under their coats and held up their hands.  They were marched out by the “police” to the waiting police car, and the four men drove away never to be seen again.

THE AFTERMATH.

Six men died on the spot.  One man, Frank Gusenberg, was still alive and was found crawling toward the door. He had been shot fourteen times.  He was taken to a hospital where he died without naming the men who shot him.  The dead were Frank Gusenberg, Pete Gusenberg, John May, Albert Weinshank, James Clark, Adam Heyer, and “Dr.” Reinhart Schwimmer (a gangster groupie) .  The problem was that Bugs Moran was not there!  He had pulled up just as the Police were getting out of their car.  Bugs figured that it was just another raid, so he left with two men. This was the end of Bugs Moran as an effective gang leader because he had lost his best men.  He would go on to live out the rest of his life as a petty criminal.  He would die with less than a hundred dollars to his name, and be buried in a potter’s field, beside other men who died penniless.

Al Capone would suffer greatly from the bad press. The public outcry was so great against Capone, that he was under too much heat to do business as usual.  He would be sent away for tax evasion and died later in Florida giving up his position as Boss to Frank Nitti.


Jack McGurn had an alibi, known as the Blonde Alibi because he was with his blonde girlfriend in a hotel all day.  He would be killed years later at a bowling alley by three men with machine guns.  It took place February 15th, 1936.

There has been much speculation about the shooters.  Two of them were almost certainly John Scalise and Albert Anselmi, two of Capones top killers.  They would be killed by him with a baseball bat three months
after the massacre.

Tony Arccado, the long time boss of The Chicago Outfit, was caught on an FBI wiretap talking about being part of the hit.  He did have  a role in the disposal of the car used in the hit.

Fred "Killer" Burke would later kill a policeman in St. Joseph, Michigan. When they went to the house Burke was using as a hideout he was gone but they found his girlfriend and an arsenal of weapons including two Thompson sub machine guns. They were used to kill Frankie Yale and were the same machine guns used in the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.

A friend of mine was able to fire these two Thompson's recently for a TV show.  He gave me a 45 caliber  casing shot from the gun.  The guns are still in a police evidence lockers today because the crimes are still open.