It’s the mid-’80s. Society writer Jan Curran and her children arrive at Paul di Amico’s Steak House, where on any given night you could run into a wide range of characters, legit and otherwise.
The mayor, Frank Bogert, is here. Businessmen and real estate agents are seated at center tables, mingling with the movers and shakers coming in and out of the piano lounge. Regular folks and a smattering of old Hollywood celebrities occupy the cushioned booths. So do some cops and mobsters.
Mobsters don’t faze the always-fashionable Curran. She regularly regales her kids with stories of “Fat Philly” and “Jerry the Crusher.” For Tod Goldberg, the youngest of Curran’s four children, the scene at the restaurant is like a movie. The only problem is he’s watching a bit too intently when a gruff-looking patron thinks he’s eavesdropping.
“Get out of this restaurant!” he barks at the boy. Curran knows the guy means business, so they get up and leave. She probably would have been comped anyway.
This isn’t Goldberg’s first experience with the criminal element in Palm Springs, and it won’t be his last.
Cut to 1986. Goldberg is now working at The Riviera. Actually he’s not working. He’s running a grift.
The 15-year-old sneaks around the resort’s pool stealing guests’ sun tan lotion. Then he discreetly fills the bottles up with regular lotion and sells it back to suckers at $15 a pop. At the end of the day, he turns in his score to a guy known as Tan Man and gets paid out in cash. But one day, after working this scam for a year, Tan Man doesn’t show up. And he owes Goldberg $167.
Goldberg goes looking for him. Someone suggests he talk to the general manager, who he finds in an office wearing more jewelry than a New Jersey housewife.
“Excuse me,” Goldberg timidly intones, “I’m looking for Tan Man.”
“Who the (expletive) are you,” the manager says.
“Oh, I’m Tod. I work for Tan Man, at the pool.”
“Do you have a W2 here?”
“No.”
“Have you ever had a conversation with me?”
“No.”
“Then get the (expletive) outta here!”
When Goldberg tells his mother he didn’t get paid, Curran doesn’t even think to admonish him for running a scam.
“You asked the guy at the Riviera for $167?” she exclaims. “Are you an idiot? He’s a foot soldier in the Bonnano family.”
Actually, he probably isn’t. Irwin Schuman, a student of Eastern spirituality, is the hotel owner and Al Anthony, a gay pianist who always wears a white cowboy hat, is the entertainment director. His headline act is accordion star Dick Contino, who attracts a large Italian-American audience to his shows.
But it’s just enough to spur the imagination of a creative teenager who has grown up hearing stories of mobsters, stars and society figures in Palm Springs.
Today, Goldberg is head of the UC Riverside Palm Desert Masters of Fine Art Creative Writing program. He’s also a published crime writer. His latest novel, “Gangsterland,” has a Las Vegas gossip columnist in it named Jan Curran.
Goldberg’s novel was partly inspired by his experiences growing up in Palm Springs in the 1970s and ’80s. He also did a stint in Vegas.
This is a legacy of the prevalence of the Mafia in Palm Springs in the 1970s and ’80s.
As a Palm Springs cop told the Chicago Tribune in 1978, “It used to be that kids in town would try to copy people like Kirk Douglas or Jerry Lewis or Frank Sinatra. Now they all think they are a bunch of Al Capones. They walk around like Mafia hit men and talking out of the sides of their mouths.”
But whatever happened to the gangsters?
Well, much of the credit for the mob’s declining presence goes to former Palm Springs Police Chief Tom Kendra, who formed a small organized crime task force in his first year.
“He came in and was clearly a more modern police chief,” says former Palm Springs City Manager Norm King. “I would put a lot of it on Tom Kendra and the department itself because they accepted it. They weren’t bucking the changes.”
Lee Weigel, Palm Springs police chief from 1997 to 2002, says other organized crime divisions began sharing information with the department toward the end of Kendra’s regime in the late-’80s.
“It had a lot to do with getting back in good graces with the LAPD and their SWAT team,” Weigel says. “They came back every year and we developed some very close relationships with LAPD’s special units. Through that, we asked several times, ‘how do we get back on track?’ “
By the time Weigel became chief, organized crime in Palm Springs “was negligible.” Many of the valley’s big fish were dead, including Tony “Big Tuna” Accardo in 1992, Tommy Marson in 1989, Jackie Cerone in 1996 and Joey “Doves” Aiuppa in 1997.
They all died of natural causes.
A 1996 California Justice Department report on organized crime in California found that mobsters from La Cosa Nostra families across the country were still known to bask in California’s warm weather. But of the three native families belonging to the syndicate of 24 families nationwide, only the Southern California Crime Family was still criminally active.
“It has been ineffective for many years because it has not been able to enforce its territorial control. As a result, California has long been known as ‘open territory’ in which no one family controls any portion of the state,” the report reads.
Rancho Mirage resident Vincent “Jimmy” Caci was one of the most powerful mobsters in Southern California up until his death in 2011 at age 86. He brought the shake-down trade he learned in Buffalo, New York, to the Coachella Valley in the late-’70s, and became a capo in the L.A. crime family under Peter and Carmine Milano. Caci’s crew was said to include his brother, Charles, Stephen “The Whale” Cino, Rocco Zangari, Steven Mauriello and Vince Lupo.
Zangari, brother of the owner of Dominick’s restaurant in Rancho Mirage, managed the first casino on an Indian reservation for the Cabazon Band in 1980, but was fired after being identified as a mobster in Senate testimony.
Charles Caci, better known locally as singer Bobby Milano, was inducted into the Palm Springs Walk of Stars shortly after his death in 2006. That was five years after pleading guilty to conspiring to sell counterfeit travelers’ checks in Las Vegas, for which he was sentenced to four months of home confinement in Palm Springs. He and Zangari, who has since moved back to Buffalo, supposedly became “made” men in the same Mafia ceremony in 1984.
In law enforcement circles, Weigel says, “Bobby was thought of as an enforcer and petty criminal.” But his friend, restaurant owner Tony Prenesti, says Milano wasn’t much of a mobster.
“I don’t think he ever made a quarter like that,” Prenesti says. “He was a singer. ‘Til the end.”
Milano died of liver cancer less than three weeks after his last performance at Prenesti’s Tony’s Pasta Mia in downtown Palm Springs on New Year’s Eve 2005.
“He promised me he was going to do New Year’s Eve,” says Prenesti. “He showed up and (a friend) carried him up to the stage and he sang his ass off. I have to tell you, he did what he wanted to do best and everybody was here — Jerry Vale, Jack Jones. He was weak when he got up there, but he gave it his best shot and that was his last show. That’s the kind of guy he was.”
Melvyn’s owner Mel Haber didn’t have such nice things to say about Zangari.
“Rocky was a wannabe gangster,” Haber says. “He walks in here one day and says to me, ‘You Jewish (expletive), I’ll turn this place into a garage.’ And he walks out. What kind of talk is that? Irv Shapiro comes in the next day with a wise guy from Vegas he hung around with. I say, ‘Irv, Rocky comes in here, says he’s going to turn the place into a garage. Two days later, Rocky Zangari walks in and says, ‘I apologize. I will never get out of line again.’ “
Former Palm Springs cop Mark Moran says Shapiro told him he owned points in the Dunes, Sands, Desert Inn and Thunderbird hotels in Las Vegas, and the Indian Wells Country Club where Accardo lived. Records show Shapiro also owned an adult book store on Ramon Road in Cathedral City.
The most devastating hit to the mob in the valley was Jimmy Caci’s conviction for telemarketing fraud in 1996.
A 1998 report from the California attorney general’s office on organized crime: “Caci’s imprisonment has left an organized crime leadership void in the Palm Springs area, with no one moving in to take his position.”
That trend continued at least through the tenure of Joe Stuart, who worked in the Palm Springs FBI office from 1989 to 2007.
“We did not have any involvement or requests from our other offices to have any dealings with any of those figures,” Stuart says. “They either died off or sold their houses and no one else came out.”
But Stuart thinks the FBI’s new priorities might be causing it to overlook the mob. Its top priority now, as noted at FBI.gov, is to protect the country from terrorist attacks. Prior to 9/11, Stuart says, the FBI had a three-tiered emphasis on foreign and counter intelligence, reaction to violent crimes, and white collar crime.
“What has happened since 9/11 is, you’ve had a transition where the FBI has gone from those three programs into an anti-terrorism group,” Stuart says. “Your white collar crime personnel have been shifted over and in the reactive group, which included organized crime, its number of personnel has been lowered. So you’ve got a shift where now you have a pie that’s huge with regards to international and domestic terrorism and the other two programs are red-headed step-children.”
One of Goldberg’s goals in writing “Gangsterland” was to illustrate how the mob has moved from traditional criminal activities, such as loan sharking, drugs and pornography, to more sophisticated money-making ventures.
“I wanted to examine, how are you going to make money in the 21st century when everything’s legal,” Goldberg says. “The cyber crime, particularly in Europe, and mortgages — that’s all true. It was prevalent during 2000-2006 with the subprime loans. Now, was it the traditional five families or five guys in track suits? It was usually five guys in track suits. All you needed to know was how to do stuff on the computer to figure things out. But, when you think about it, the traditional ways that the Mafia made money — through gambling, through drugs, through sex — all those things in Vegas, you don’t need to go to a crook to do those things. Gambling in and of itself is a dead business for organized crime. There’s no money in it when someone can go somewhere and just buy it legally.”
When New Jersey mobster Willie Moretti was asked at the 1951 Kefauver Senate hearings if he was a mobster, he replied, “They call anybody a mobster who makes six percent more on money.”
Stuart says the mob’s infiltration into big business has caused law enforcement decisions to be transferred from street-level detectives to government political appointees.
“When I worked, if I had an inkling that a violation was committed in my territory and I had an idea who did it, I could initiate,” he says. “I could request the supervisor to open and assign a case to me on John Q. Bad Guy. My supervisor could assign it out and I could start work.
“It is no longer available to current agents. What has happened in the last few years is, nobody can do anything unless the headquarters and Department of Justice say you can do it. The ability of an agent to start an investigation has been curtailed. I find that to be a real problem in that you can stifle the desire of an investigator to do his work if you rein in that agent so tight that he can’t do anything. In the same way, in high profile cases, I believe the higher up you go in the FBI, the more timid the individuals become and the more problems you have with investigations on either politically sensitive or high interest, newsworthy cases. You run into a problem.”
An October 2011 FBI report on organized crime states that there are 33,000 gangs operating in the United States, including motorcycle gangs and an expansion of Mexican-American, African, Asian, Eurasian, Caribbean, Middle Eastern and hybrid organizations.
But the largest coordinated organized crime takedown in FBI history took place 10 months earlier when 127 East Coast mobsters were arrested, including such high-ranking figures as Richard Fusco, consigliere of New York’s Colombo family.
The Mafia was far from dead.
“The notion that today’s mob families are more genteel and less violent than in the past is put to lie by the charges contained in the indictments unsealed today,” Janice Fedarcyk, assistant director in charge of the New York FBI office, said after the arrests. “Even more of a myth is the notion that the mob is a thing of the past; that La Cosa Nostra is a shadow of its former self.”
But Stuart wonders if top government officials will have the guts to continue to investigate the new well-integrated mob.
“If you can’t get the Justice Department to start an investigation, you’re dead in the water before you started,” he says. “That’s a total shift from the old days.”