The first question we asked was, “Who is the Washington Mafia boss?”
The invariable answer was that the local underworld was unaffiliated with the national setup, free and independent, self-contained.
All our experience made us reject that picture. We had traced and charted organized crime through the gang wars of Prohibition to this day. We had charged and it was being substantiated that no city of importance was left out of the clutches of the Mafia, with its brains in New York and its powerhouse in Chicago. It was inconceivable that a rich, large center on the Atlantic seaboard, almost a suburb of Manhattan, could be bypassed. So we found out for ourselves. This is the situation in Washington:
The National Syndicate, for reasons of prudence, has avoided first-hand operations in the District. You find few important Sicilian names in the police files. Vice, crime, gambling, narcotics and, to a smaller extent, contraband liquor, are farmed out by franchise to a cohesive local mob which deals with and pays tribute to national headquarters.
Despite tremendous influence, legal advice and guidance and the constitutional immunity against self-incrimination, the Mafia has an almost superstitious fear of Congressional committees. A city administration can be bought or scared or rigged. But nobody can capture 96 Senators and 435 Representatives. And any one of these is one of the immediate bosses of Washington; and any one of these can arise any day and demand a probe of anything. On the rare occasions when important racketeers were dragged to Washington on subpena, with all the assurances they got from many members beholden to them and the shocking obeisance paid them openly, they wet their pants in the witness chair.
Yet, these greedy gluttons can’t find it in their miserly souls to declare it an open town, any more than they can force themselves to pay honest income taxes, though they awaken in their silk pajamas screaming, from nightmare dreams about Al Capone and Alcatraz.
District of Columbia is and was dominated by Emmitt Warring, Gary Quinn, Sam Beard, the Sussman brothers and Attilio Acalotti. The chief operation of these men is gambling, which will be traced in more detail later. They staked out locations in Washington, worked together in harmony, well aware that the capital would not go for Chicago-style assassinations.
But the national Syndicate did not hesitate to work openly in the adjoining Maryland suburbs, where the late Jimmy La Fontaine, who died in bed at the age of 81 in 1949, was the local front man. Fontaine’s rococo gambling casino, across the street from the District line, was as far as the Mafia cared to go openly. His chief lieutenants were Snags Lewis, Pete Gianaris and Mike Meyers. Snags has pleaded guilty to a mild rap on a bargain which will take the heat off others.
We have described the dope setup in the District, where local wholesalers send to New York for supplies, so that the Mafia does not have to deliver them in the capital. By a similar procedure, the gamblers and other racketeers procure their wire service from representatives of the big mob, across the border in Maryland. Snags Lewis was the local wire service man.
When it came to such things as numbers, whoring, illicit liquor and after-hour spots in the District, the local boys tried to hold on to as much as they could. They didn’t want to divvy up with the Syndicate. The big mob didn’t like that.