Waterfront Around Manhattan Phillip Lopate

He was a violent killer, and along with Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, the head of Murder Inc. The way he lived his life, Albert Anastasia will have to have thought he was bulletproof: until he made one too numerous trips to his barbershop.

Albert Anastasia was born Umberto Anastasio on September 26, 1902 in Calabria, located in the southern percentage of Italy. When he was 15, Albert and his brother Tony hopped on an Italian ship and snuck off illegally on the docks of Brooklyn, New York. It was said that Albert was so poor, he arrived in America with no shoes. Albert lived with a relative in Brooklyn until he at long last found work on the Brooklyn docks as a longshoreman, alongside his brother Tony.

Albert Anastasia had a violent temper, and it was manifested in 1920, when he was arrested for killing fellow longshoreman Joe Torino. Anastasia strangled and poked Torino, over who had the right to offload ships with the most cherished cargo. Anastasia was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. It was at this time he changed his last name from Anastasio to Anastasia, he said, “not to sully his family’s name.” His brother “Tough Tony,” who later ruled the Brooklyn docks, kept the last name of Anastasio.

Anastasia had expended eighteen months waiting to be executed in Sing Sing Prison, when his lawyer was in some manner capable to obtain a new trial. At the second trial, assorted witnesses to Torino’s murder changed their affirmations as to who the killer was, and four more witnesses disappeared from the face of the earth, never to surface again. With no proof versus Anastasia, the prosecutors had no choice but to drop their case, and Anastasia became a free man. Anastasia would use this tactic of “eliminating witnesses” various more times all around the years to keep away from prosecution for murder.

Upon his release from prison, Anastasia joined the gang of Joe “The Boss” Masseria, considered the top Mafioso in America. During this time, Anastasia became tight with fellow mobsters Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Frank Costello, and it became clear that Anastasia was more of a follower than a leader.

In 1930, Luciano formed a plan to get rid of his boss – Masseria – then get rid of Masseria’s successor – Salvatore Maranzano. Luciano’s uttermost goal was to unite all the crime families in America: Italian Mafia members, Irish gangsters like Owney Maddon, and Jewish gangsters like Meyer Lansky, into one National Crime Commission.

When Luciano told Anastasia regarding his plans, Anastasia was ecstatic. He told Luciano, “Charlie, I’ve been waiting for this day for at least eight years. You’re going to be on top, if I have to kill every one for you. With you up there, that’s the only way we may have any peace and make real money.”

With Anastasia’s help, Luciano did what he set out to do. Anastasia, along with Bugsy Siegel, was one of the four gunman, who in 1931, shot Masseria to death in a Coney Island restaurant. With Masseria out of the way, Luciano formed the remaining made mafia men into five discerned crime families. As a reward for his good work, Luciano made Anastasia the underboss in the family of Vincent Mangano.

After Luciano’s takeover, things ran with no problems or difficulties for the Nation Crime Commission. The Commission made cash in bushels, from running illegal liquor for the duration of prohibition, and from the old mob standards like bookmaking, gambling, hijacking, and the distribution of drugs. Of course, in order to keep the cash flowing in, once in a while people had to be killed. As a result of Anastasia’s loyalty, Luciano, along with Meyer Lansky, put Anastasia and Louie “Lepke” Buchalter in charge of what the press called “Murder Incorporated.”

This group of killers, which numbered over 100, was likewise called “The Boys From Brooklyn.” With Anastasia being the exception, Murder Inc. was comprised of for the most part Jewish killers, including Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, Allie Tannenbaum, Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, and Gurrah Shapiro. It was approximated that under Anastasia and Buchalter’s direction, anyplace from 500-1000 murders were consecrated all around the country, and only a handful were ever solved. While bodies were piling up all over America, Anastasia was ostensibly working a honorable job. The business card he always carried in his breast pocket said he was a “sales representative” for the Convertible Mattress Corporation in Brooklyn.

In the late 1930′s, Murder Inc. dissolved when it top killers were arrested, tried, and convicted on a heap of murder changes. With Reles and Tannenbaum agreeing to testify in interchange for a lighter sentence, assorted Murder Inc. perpetrators were fried in the Sing Sing Electric Chair, including Buchalter, who was the only crime boss ever executed by the government.

Anastasia obviated prosecution for a while, until it was encountered that Reles was set to testify as to Anastasia’s and Bugsy Siegel’s involvement with Murder Inc. Reles was underneath 24-hour police guard at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island. Police were stationed to guard Reles, even when he was sleeping.

On the night of November 12, 1941, Reles was supposedly underneath police guard and sleeping in his room, when inexplicably he fell to his death from his 6th story window. The official report said Reles passed from physical life while “attempting to escape.” Years later, Luciano said that Frank Costello, in order to save Anastasia and Siegel’s hide, paid the police $50,000 to look the other way, while Costello’s men flung Reles from the window. Other stories said that the cops did the flinging of Reles themselves. Either way, according to District Attorney William O’Dwyer, “His case (against Anastasia and Siegel) went out the window with Reles.”

In 1936, Luciano was arrested, tried, and convicted on a trumped-up charge of prostitution, and given a 30-year prison sentence. Luciano claimed he had been set up by Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, and there’s proof that Luciano may have been right. The witnesses versus Luciano were all pimps and prostitutes, who later said they lied on the witness stand, rather than being thrown in jail by Dewey.

In 1942, with Luciano languishing in jail, Anastasia, with the support of his brother Tony, developed a system to spring Luciano. It was in the middle of World War II, and the plan Anastasia hatched was based on the old mob “protection racket.” With Tony controlling the docks, it was rather easy for his men to sabotage ships on the New York waterfront. And that’s incisively what they did.

After assorted ships were bombed and burned (the most widely known and esteemed being the French Luxury Liner S.S. Normandie, which was being converted into a troopship, when it was burned and capsized in New York Harbor), Anastasia offered assistance to the United States government, to protect the waterfront from saboteurs (from themselves, of course). The payback from the government was when the war ended, Luciano was to be freed from prison, as payment for waterfront shelter services rendered. And that’s was precisely what happened, when in 1946, Luciano was freed from prison, and deported back to Italy, where he ran his crime family until his death from a heart attack in 1962.

Anastasia had worked with great success as Vincent Mangano’s underboss for 30 years, when in 1951, Anastasia all of a sudden got ambitious. Over the years, Mangano had grown resentful of Anastasia’s closeness to Luciano and Frank Costello. Many times, Anastasia bypassed his boss Mangano and had, for one reason or another, gone directly to Luciano, or Costello. Several times, Mangano physically attacked Anastasia, which was a foolhardy move, since Anastasia was younger, and stronger, leading to Anastasia beating up his own boss in self defense.

Things in the Mangano family were not going well for Anastasia, when Anastasia asked permission from Costello, now the huge boss with Luciano in exile in Italy, to whack Mangano. On April 19, 1951, Mangano’s brother Philip was riddled with bullets and dropped in a swamp in Sheepshead Bay. Later that same day, Vincent Mangano disappeared, and his body was never found. In a few days, after he was sure Mangano was in truth dead, Costello appointed Anastasia the head of the former Mangano crime family, thereby making Anastasia share of the five-man Commission

Costello had a personal reason for why he wanted Anastasia on the Commission. After fleeing to Italy because he was wanted on a murder charge, Vito Genovese had returned to the United States. Genovese was angry because he thought that he, and not Costello, must be the head of the Commission. (Before escaping to Italy, Genovese was the Commission boss. With Genovese out of the country and Luciano still in jail at the time, Luciano then appointed Costello as top man on the Commission.) Genovese was known as a brutal man, who killed introductory and asked questions later. With Anastasia on Costello’s side, Costello felt the had somebody just as tough as Genovese, who could protect Costello’s high ranking.

What Costello did not envision was that Anastasia was a bloodthirsty, homicidal maniac, who would kill anyone, for any reason, real or imagined. Anastasia’s madness manifested itself one day when he was watching television. On the news, a 24-year old Brooklyn salesman named Arnold Schuster was basking in the limelight, as the person who was the main witness in the arrest of legendary bank robber Willie Sutton. Schuster had been riding the subway, when he spotted Sutton. Schuster followed Sutton after Sutton left the subway, and tracked him to a nearby garage. Sutton called the police and Sutton was arrested.

Seeing Schuster being treated like a hero by the press, Anastasia freaked out. “I can’t stand squealers,” Anastasia told one of his killers Fredrick J. Tenuto. “Hit that guy!” And that Tenuto did just that, gunning down Schuster on a Brooklyn street, not far from where Schuster lived.

Realizing that Tenuto was the only person who knew Anastasia had ordered Schuster’s murder, Anastasia took care of Tenuto himself, filling Tenuto with bullets, before Tenuto could spill the beans in regards to Anastasia’s orders.

However, the word was already out that Anastasia, now called “The Mad Hatter,” had gone overboard and had disobeyed one of the Commission’s greatest rules, “We only kill each other.”

As far as Genovese was concerned, Anastasia had made fault #1. From this point on, Genovese started out plotting Anastasia’s demise.

Besides Costello, one of Anastasia’s nearest allies was Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky. Lansky, for a while, turned a deaf ear to Genovese’s pleas to kill Anastasia. Lansky was big into the gambling industry on the island of Cuba. As all good mob bosses should, Lansky was cutting in the other Commission members for a piece of the pie on what he was raking in in Cuba. However, Anastasia wanted more. He neared Lansky in regards to giving him a more prominent slice, and when Lansky refused, Anastasia started out plotting to open up his own gambling operation in Cuba.

That was a bad fault on Anastasia’s part. Lansky had consorted to the killing of his childhood friend Bugsy Siegel, when it was encountered Siegel had been skimming off the top in the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. Money was sacrosanct to Lansky, and Anastasia was threatening to take cash out of Lansky’s pocket.

Make that fault #2 for Anastasia.

Anastasia’s fault #3 materialized when Genovese found out Anastasia, in order to induct new made members into this family, was charging proposed members $50,000 apiece for induction into the Honored Society. This was a definitive no-no in the Mafia. Men waited years, most times even decades, to “get their buttons.” In addition, the rule at the time was that each proposed fellow member had to have been involved in at least one murder to even be considered for induction. Genovese said Anastasia had devalued the entire Mafia institution by taking cash payments from men, who were not qualified to be inducted into the “La Cosa Nostra,” as mob informer Joe Valachi later said insiders called their sacred group.

On October 25, 1957, Anastasia’s chauffeur parked Anastasia’s car in the underground garage of the Park Sheridan Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Instead of waiting inside the garage for his boss to return, the chauffeur decisive to take a little stroll out of the building. Anastasia took a little stroll of his own, and he wound up sitting in chair No. 4 in the Park Sheridan Hotel barbershop. Sitting next to Anastasia in chair No. 5 was his old friend Vincent “Jimmy Jerome” Squillante. Anastasia sat with his eyes closed, appearing to have nary a care in the world. Soon he would be right.

Suddenly, two men walked into the barbershop. One was carrying a.38-caliber pistol; the other a.32 caliber pistol. One of the men told barbershop owner Arthur Grasso, ” Keep your mouth shut if you don’t want your head blown off.”

Then the two men commenced shooting. One bullets lodged in the back of Anastasia’s head and two shots hit him in the left hand. Another bullet hit him in the back, and another blasted through the right side of his hip. Anastasia stagged to his feet, facing the mirror of the barbershop. Seeing the refections of his two killers in the mirror, Anastasia lurched toward the mirror. The killers kept firing until their guns were empty, and Anastasia fell on his back, amid two barber chairs, rather dead.

Squillante didn’t recognise whether to cry, or go blind. Seeing the dead Anastasia on the floor, he screamed to no one in particular, “Let me out of here!” Then he exited stage right, into lobby of the Park Sheridan Hotel, and disappeared.

According to manicurist Jean Wineberger, one shooter was a white male, around 40 years old, 5-feet-10-inches, with a sight built, and a blond pompadour haircut. The second shooter was also a white male, around 45 years old, stockily built, and regarding 5-feet-7-inches. Wineberger thought the shooters looked Italian, but she said they could have been Jewish also.

No one was officially charged with Anastasia’s murder and regarding a dozen persons over the years have claimed they had been involved in Anastasia’s killing. The most likely scenario was that Mob boss Joe Profaci was given the hit by the other Commissioner members. Profaci subcontracted out the actual shooting to his underling, the unpredictable “Crazy” Joe Gallo, from the Red Hook section of Brooklyn.

Gallo was not timid in regards to taking the credit for the Anastasia hit. Soon after the hit, Gallo was talking to a crime associate Sidney Slater. Gallo told Slater that he, Sonny Camerone, Ralph Mafrici, Joe “Joe Jelly” Gioelli and Frank “Punchy” Illiano comprised the Anastasia hit-team.

The buttons on his shirt bursting in pride, Gallo told Slater, “You may call the five of us the barbershop quintet.”

The most telling comment regarding Anastasia’s murder was uttered by Anastasia’s brother “Tough Tony” Anastasio.

“Tough Tony” told a mob associate, “I ate from the same table as Albert and I came from the same womb. But I recognise he killed a good deal of men and he deserved to die.”

Waterfront Around Manhattan Phillip Lopate

East Side, West Side, from the Little Red Lighthouse to Battery Park City, the wonders of Manhattan’s waterfront are both celebrated and secret–hidden in plain sight. In his brilliant exploration of this defining yet neglected shoreline, personal essayist Philip Lopate also recovers a percentage of the city’s soul.
A native New Yorker, Lopate has embraced Manhattan by walking each inch of it is perimeter, telling stories on the way of pirates (Captain Kidd) and power brokers (Robert Moses), the lowly shipworm and Typhoid Mary, public housing in Harlem and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. He evokes the magic of the once bustling old port from Melville’s and Whitman’s day to the era of the longshoremen in On the Waterfront, while appraising today’s developers and environmental activists, and probing new plans for parks and pleasure domes with river views. Whether escorting us into unfamiliar, highrisk crannies or along a Beaux Arts esplanade, Waterfront is a grand literary ramble and defense of urban life by one of our most perceptive observers.

From Booklist*Starred Review* A native New Yorker, avid walker, and impeccable stylist, Lopate, whose last book, Getting Personal [BKL N 15 03], showcases his signature essays, now presents his breakout book, an illuminating exploration of Manhattan’s queerly neglected waterfront. As enthusiasti a researcher as he is an intrepid wanderer, Lopate seamlessly mixes witty and candid accounts of his ramblings along the bedraggled edge of this great metropolis with the fruits of his deep reading to construct a arousing and attention holding narrative that encompasses historical, literary, cultural, aesthetic, and environmental perspectives. By citing origins as diverse as Melville and On the Waterfront, Lopate celebrates the old “rough-and-ready” waterfront with it is spiny perpendicular piers radiating out into the Hudson River like bones from a fish’s spine and the “raffish” dockworkers from the days before containerized shipping put an end to Manhattan’s maritime vitality. He reconnoiters the entire West Side waterfront from the Battery to Washington Heights, encountering both serene beauty and straightout blight, while along the East River he sneaks into the deteriorating interior of the Brooklyn Bridge and ventures out to a deserted island. Dispensing a bounty of curious facts and acute observations, Lopate explicates the interconnectivity of nature and culture, politics and public works, and offers magnificent suggestions for reviving Manhattan’s moribund waterfront. Step one is to make humans care, a feat this compelling travelogue performs to perfection. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review“A marvelously observant, elegiac, and far-reaching historical meditation.”–The New York Times

“The celebrated essayist takes a tour of the city’s ever-changing perimeter, sharing his psychological result of perception learning and reasoning of New York’s history, mythology, and plans for the future. Poring over his informed, readable prose is like taking a stroll with a bestloved professor: he is opinionated, casual, and erudite in equivalent measure.”–Conde-Nast Traveler

“A bright blend of history, guidebook, white paper, and urban sketch. In Waterfront Lopate has enriched and refined his style by taking it rather in a literal sense to the vortex’s watery edge, and for any individual marveling with regards to that shoreline, his book will be a lively and trustable compass.”–The Nation

“Part personal essay, share municipal history, share architectural guide, portion criticism and part utopian musing . . . Waterfront makes magnificent reading for all those who feel the romance of the city’s past and . . . for those with an interest in the growing healthiness of the city’s waterways and in architecture and urban planning.”–The New York Times Book Review

“Phillip Lopate has surrounded his subject and been surrounded by it in turn. His Waterfront is an elegant, elegiac, scrapwork masterpiece.” –Jonathan Lethem

“Where less keen observers see only ugliness, Lopate discerns the raffish beauty that once was, the bright future prospects or potentials that might be.”–Newsday

“Phillip Lopate . . . demonstrates that you don’t have to go to the ends of the world to be a great explorer. Anyone who finds Manhattan fascinating–there ought to be assorted million of us–would do well to read Waterfront, his beauteous ramble into it is heart and soul.” –E.L. Doctorow

“For strangers to New York, Waterfront will be an inviting introduction to the city’s underappreciated edges. Natives will find surprising ideas and places in a metropolis they thought they knew.”–Newark Star-Ledger

“Philip Lopate is a walker in the city like no other since Charles Dickens: He is archaeologist, historian, explorer, poet, observer (an observer of himself observing), muser, muller, and mooner; and all the while he is leading us through streets and crannies and old politics and concealed sights and right-in-front-of your nose scenes and structures, compelling our poignant or astonished notice.” –Cynthia Ozick

“One man’s saunter through a city he loves. . . . The stories are staged with tenderness and authenti concern . . . without the faintest whiff of sentimentality.”– The Oregonian

“Lopate is a fantastic writer–humane, wry, and always astonishingly more than willing to take on the ineffable, attuned to the complexities of symbiotic relationships we only intuited before his dazzling collage was created.” –Ann Beattie

“[Lopate] writes like cream pouring from a jug. . . . Richly entertaining.”–Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Waterfront is a potpourri of astute architectural critiques fresh readings of shoreline classics (literary and cinematic), snips of autobiography, and a string of vest pocket histories (the one on Westway is by itself worth the price of admission). By turns funny and acerbic, gently playful and bracingly argumentative, it’s a moveable feast.” –Mike Wallace, co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“A native New Yorker, avid walker, and impeccable stylist . . . Lopate seamlessly mixes witty and candid accounts of his ramblings along the bedraggled edge of this great metropolis to formulate a arousing and attention holding narrative that encompasses historical, literary, cultural, aesthetic, and environmental perspectives.”–Booklist (starred)

“An intensely and delightfully personal account of the Manhattan waterfront, full of clear or deep perception and information, that weaves together one man’s life and New York history for a rare, readable book–Ada Louise Huxtable

“Philip Lopate makes the waterfront that has vanished as bright as the one that has pulled through . . .the sudden intense sensation is not just in his dissimilar voices–tour-guide, archaeologist, detective, social scientist, historian of yesterday and today, lyrical poet, pragmatist, utopian, man alone on the cliffs, public citizen in the streets–but in the brilliant fluency with which he jump-cuts back and forth amidst them.” –Marshall Berman

Waterfront Around Manhattan Phillip Lopate Pic

Waterfront Around Manhattan Phillip Lopate Photo

Waterfront Around Manhattan Phillip Lopate Pic

Waterfront Around Manhattan Phillip Lopate Picture

Most helpful customer reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
A mixed bag: great insights, some tedium, and a dubious achievement
By A. McDonald
This is a decidedly uneven book, and coming from such a talented writer it really seems a bit tossed off. There are the moments that make the book really worth reading, such as his elegiac descriptions of Manhattan’s beauty, and notes on how our ruined industrial landscapes are so powerfully heartbreaking. Lovely. He is best at his descriptions of how the waterfront is tied deeply into the urbanity of all Manhattan. And while it’s somewhat fruitless to wax nostalgic about the bustle of the port since it will never return to a working port city again, Lopate is wonderful on why it is powerfully tempting to do so.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Big and small distances around Manhattan
By Rocco Dormarunno
One of New York’s premiere writers, Phillip Lopate, has written this wonderful book, WATERFRONT: A JOURNEY AROUND MANHATTAN, about his trek up the Hudson, through the harbor, and up the East River. This is not a long journey in length, but it evokes decades upon decades upon centuries of the history of New York.

What Lopate has evoked, at the same time, is an awareness that somewhere in our development, we have lost touch with the fact that Manhattan is an island, and that our formidable legacy was derived from the fact that, for centuries, we were a powerful port city. Goods and immigrants arrived to our shores by ship well into the 20th century. And then, for several reasons and not all of them good ones, we began to shun the river, the tidal strait (East River), and our harbor.

For the most part though, Lopate delights in seeing the city the way our forebears saw it. And then, sometimes, the effect is enormously sad: specifically, his journey to North Brother Island, the site where the General Slocum burned and partially sank, where so many bodies washed ashore as others died in the island’s hospital. This section is eerily poignant and, to me, the best written. Lopate and his companions did not escape North Brother unscathed, physically and emotionally. And I doubt most readers will put down WATERFRONT without feeling unchanged. This is a wonderful book for New Yorkers and/or history fans.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Best Book I’ve Read on New York in a Long Time
By Mark K. Mcdonough
Phillip LoPate’s “Waterfront” is an elegantly structured, beautifully written book. The central narrative thread takes him around the perimeter of the island of Manhattan, and anyone who’s even a little bit curious about ruins, industrial archaeology, and odd and forgotten spots will read about his adventures and travails with great pleasure.

LoPate is also well versed in urban design, architecture and New York’s history and uses each neighborhood as a chance to discuss everything from the politics of urban renewal to Manhattan’s history as a center of piracy.

In addition to the neighborhood-by-neighborhood travelogue, LoPate also includes several short “excursions” on other topics of related to New York’s history and present, ranging from a discussion of shipworms to a revisionist look at the much-loathed Robert Moses.

Not only is LoPate’s own writing wonderful, but he drops in lots of pointers to other works — I’m really tempted to look for “Heartbeats in the Muck” (about the ecological revival of NY harbor) if only to have the title on my bookshelf.

Frankly, I picked this book up because I thought it would be a good before-bed book — not too engaging, nice sleep aid. The joke was on me: I ended up staying up all night and reading the entire thing.

See all 15 customer reviews…