Allan May

The Italian Mayfield Road Mob dominated organized crime in Cleveland during the latter years of Prohibition. Many members of the gang came from the Little Italy section located on Cleveland’s East Side and, prior to prohibition, specialized in payroll stickups.  One such bloody stickup, which resulted in three executions of robbers, has gone down in Cleveland history.
by Allan May

The Italian Mayfield Road Mob dominated organized crime in Cleveland during the latter years of Prohibition. Many members of the gang came from the Little Italy section located on Cleveland’s East Side, where Murray Hill and Mayfield Road are the two main arteries through the neighborhood.

The gang’s specialty was payroll robberies.

Without the safeguards of bank wire transfers and commercial armored cars, payroll robberies had become such a common occurrence in Cleveland during the late teens and early 1920s that the city’s three daily newspapers had made them a staple of their front pages. This was a time when many business payrolls were handled by company officials who went to the bank on a weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly schedule to pick up cash to pay employees. If companies didn’t hire or provide armed escorts or if they didn’t alter their transfer procedures by taking different routes to and from the bank, or scheduling different pick-up times, they could easily become targets of payroll bandits.

One of the more sensational payroll robberies took place on the morning of Dec. 31, 1920, resulting in the double slaying of Wilfred C. Sly and George K. Fanner of the W. W. Sly Manufacturing Company.

Samuel Samuzzo Amatuna

The story of a flashy Chicago gangster who killed his first man at age 17, then rose to the top of mobsterdom -- only to find that not only is it lonely at the top, but dangerous.

by Allan May

"In the first place, according to the ‘boys in the racket,’ Samoots was the most generous of them all," said a close friend. He would go to the local barbershop and buy the boys haircuts and shaves. Samoots would then ask someone to help him pick out a new suit and then buy that man one to match. "He never knew when to stop giving," another friend said, "Those who knew him said his hands were always open and he always had a smile."

But, if he wanted someone removed… "Sure," said one of his intimates, "If he wanted a guy knocked off, he’d have him knocked off, what the hell? But he was a good guy just the same."

Samoots, whose real name was Samuel Samuzzo Amatuna, had a short but colorful career in the Chicago underworld. Called the "Beau Brummel of Little Italy" by the newspapers, his rise and fall paralleled that of the Genna gang of Chicago, a family of six brothers with a ruthless reputation with whom Amatuna was once closely associated.

Bootleggers in the 1920's

Our organized crime columnist, examines a perplexing unsolved double murder case from Cleveland.

by Allan May

On January 16, 1920, prohibition went into effect nationwide. Two weeks later, in Cleveland, Ohio, a double murder took place that shocked the city. Were the bootleg wars off to a bloody start in the city on the shores of Lake Erie? Or was there something else behind the murder of the two successful businessmen from New York. The police quickly advanced two murder theories. One was that the killings were due to a whiskey running operation - the victims were killed to prevent the arrest of other gang members, or to prevent a whiskey shipment from being confiscated. The second theory was that the killings were linked to a vendetta, family feud, or plot of the Camorra or the Black Hand.

Just after midnight on January 30, 1920, two Salvation Army workers, Sherman and Elizabeth Ransopher, were returning from a meeting in Cleveland. As they walked from West 25^th Street down Pearl Road on the city’s near west side, Mrs. Ransopher spotted a leg extending from a ditch near the edge of the road at the corner of Bader Avenue and Pearl Road. She screamed. The couple slowly moved closer. Although it was dark, the couple had no problem making out three bodies piled together in the snow-filled ditch. The faces of the three bodies were covered with blood and small pools of blood had already begun to form beside them.

Tommy Bilotti

A look at Paul Castellano's underboss, Tommy Bilotti, a man who struck fear in New York City.

by Allan May

Tommy Bilotti lay spread eagle in the middle of the cold, wet Manhattan street like he was snoozing on a king-size bed. But Tommy Bilotti was not asleep, he was dead, and blood was streaming from the six wounds he suffered to his head and body. Bilotti was not the main focus of the police, the media and the morbidly fascinated who gathered in front of Sparks Steak House on this mid-December evening in 1985. The focus was Paul Castellano who was lying several feet away, just outside the passenger side door of Bilotti’s black Lincoln Continental. "Big Paulie" was the head of the Gambino Crime Family, which at the time was the largest and most powerful organized crime family in the United States. Bilotti was the newly named underboss of the family.

Who was Tommy Bilotti and how did he rise to the position of second-in-command of this infamous crime family? In "Boss of Bosses," FBI agents Joseph O’Brien and Andris Kurins describe Bilotti:

"He was basically a pit bull with shoes on. If he had a business ability beyond choreographing a shakedown or calculating the interest owed on shylock loans, it didn’t show. In a milieu not known for its conversational finesse, Bilotti distinguished himself by spluttering inarticulateness."

Lucky Luciano

Despite what some academics still contend, it's more fable than fact that Lucky Luciano was behind the massacre of mob leaders that became known as the Night of Sicilian Vespers.

by Allan May

I became fascinated by the "Night of Sicilian Vespers" after reading about it in the book Murder, Inc. during the mid-1980s. I repeated the story to friends at work, speaking like an authority and explaining how the Mafia didn’t exist anymore because it was wiped out back in 1931 on the day that Salvatore Maranzano, the Boss of Bosses, the "capo de tutti capo," was murdered in his Park Avenue office. September 10, 1931 was the day of "The Americanization of the Mobs."

Over the years though I became curious. Who were the 40 individuals who perished in one night of butchery? After all, look at the attention the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre generated, and that was only seven people.

Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti

The true story of how this infamous gangster was almost murdered by a Chicago detective.

by Allan May

Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti was a survivor. He survived the bullets of Robert Stack in the television series "The Untouchables," where the only character more inflated than Eliot Ness was Nitti himself. He then survived being pushed off a courthouse roof by Kevin Costner in the movie "The Untouchables," in which the only historically accurate details were the names Ness, Capone and Nitti. However, on December 19, 1932, Nitti would face his biggest challenge in trying to survive after he was shot three times by a Chicago police detective.

Mike Coppola

Mob informant Joey Cantalupo once stated in a video documentary that organized crime members "like to keep their wives at home, barefoot and pregnant." Mike Coppola handled things quite differently. He liked his wives to be bloodied and beaten and, if a threat to him, dead. Each of Coppola’s two wives died at a relatively young age. One from murder, the other from suicide.
by Allan May

Doris Lehman was a beautiful dancer. Tall and thin, she had long legs, dark hair and eyes. Many men found her stunning. Mike Coppola was one of them. Coppola, known as "Trigger Mike," had risen through the mob ranks and by the early 1940s was running the Harlem numbers and narcotics operations. Coppola and Doris were married in 1943; the following year a son was born.

One of Coppola’s jobs was to keep the local politicians in harness. When it became known that Joseph Scottoriggio, the Republican district captain in Harlem, intended to back the opposition candidate to mob favorite Vito Marcantonio, Coppola decided to pay him a visit. With wife and father-in-law David Lehman in tow, Coppola and underling Joey Rao were unable to dissuade the determined Scottoriggio.

Early on Election Day morning, Coppola, Rao and two other men attacked Scottoriggio shortly after he left his apartment, delivering a vicious beating that resulted in Scottoriggio’s death six days later.