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“Be the little guy. That way, they don’t see you comin’.”

“Judges, lawyers and congressmen have a license to steal. We don’t need one.”

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to better, but when there is nothing left to steal”

– FBI wiretap transcripts of Don Carlo Gambino, giving sagely advice to a newly ‘made’ rookie mafioso at his initiation ceremony.

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Do you play Scrabble? If you play it with family and friends casually, that’s okay, but if you play competition, it pays to be aware of some two and three letter ‘hook’ words that you never knew existed. These are words that hook the letters in your tray onto a string on the board, sometimes leading to a big score. In a competition, it is those little words that decide if you’ll win or you’ll lose.

(Did you know that ‘ed’ is a word? I bet you didn’t. No, it doesn’t stand for ‘Erectile Dysfunction’. It means ‘specialized’.)

If a human could be likened to a scrabble hook word, then there was once such a man in America, far more powerful than any President. For a while in the 1940s through the 1970s, he ruled America as the head of a vast criminal enterprise larger than America’s largest business enterprises.

If I may draw a parallel, this man managed his affairs in some ways similar to the Roman Emperor, Claudius, quietly, away from the spotlight. Historians say that Claudius was the most consequential of the Julio-Claudian emperors and so was this man. He was from the same part of the world as Claudius, only he was born 1800 years later, in a dirt poor household in Palermo, Sicily. In 1919, unable to get work, he stole away in a freighter to the US, aged 17.

Meet Don Carlo Gambino (1902-1976).

Like Claudius, Gambino too went on to become an emperor in his own right. Only, in his case it was not a country, but a tightly-knit, murderous fraternity. The members of the fraternity didn’t just call him an emperor, but as a sign of respect and fear that he generated, Carlo Gambino was known as the Capo di tutti Capi (boss of all bosses), the most powerful American mobster in history.

And the most respected. Carlo Gambino gained the trust and confidence of his peers and this borne out by the fact that he was one of just a handful of mafia bosses who managed to die a natural death, of old age.

A diminutive man with beedy eyes, a large nose and a mild, pleasant and deferential demeanor, Gambino was anything but imposing in stature. He never made his orders sound like demands. He issued them as requests that were deferential in tone. A compatriot of his, Joe Bonnano, one of the powerful heads of the five New York crime families of the 50s, once called Gambino a ‘squirrel of a man’. Maybe he did have the looks of a squirrel but he was anything but that. In fact Don Carlo Gambino had what he exhorted his men to acquire – the heart of a lion, speed of a cheetah, cunning of a fox and venom of a viper.

To rise through the vicious world of the mafioso right around the time organized crime was coming of age in America and be able to reach the very pinnacle, keeping at bay and earning the respect of the legends of the time – Lucky Luciano, Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Joe Colombo, Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky – needed a special kind of nerve and only Don Carlo had it in him.

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Gambino had the rare ability to see two moves ahead and act without hesitation when he saw an advantage. His mantra was……’when you want to get at the other guy, first make him believe you are giving in to what he wants’. When the ambitious Vito Genovese tried to grab territory that belonged to him, Gambino laid a trap for him. He knew that Genovese was heavily involved in drug trafficking, an activity that was still in a nascent stage and frowned upon by the mafia bosses of the day. He also knew that three other bosses – Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano – hated Genovese.

Gambino saw an opportunity. He roped the other three in and put together a lucrative drug deal that was too good for Genovese to pass up. Then Gambino paid a Puerto Rican drug dealer $100,000 to rat on Genovese to the FBI. The dealer was small fry and could not possibly have had access to mafia bosses. Besides, his testimony should have been struck down as hearsay. But the FBI wanted Genovese so bad that they swallowed the Puerto Rican’s account as authentic and managed to win a conviction. Genovese was put away for 20 years, eventually dying of a heart attack while still incarcerated.

In the film “The Godfather”, Michael Corleone says to his lover, Kay Adams, “My father is no different than any other powerful man. He’s like a President or a Senator, any man who feels responsible for others, his friends, his family, his people…” That would aptly describe how Carlo Gambino saw himself. It was a sentiment that played large in his psyche – that he was the savior. The author, Mario Puzo, created Don Vito Corleone, the character of the Godfather, from a melange of real life mobsters but the most striking resemblance is to Carlo Gambino.

While the other New York mafia bosses would lead ostentatious lives – owning palatial mansions, flashy limos and strings of mistresses, Don Carlo was a singularly unpretentious man who was content living in a modest 2-storey brick house in Brooklyn that he shared with his wife of 40 years, the only difference being that the house was at the end of a heavily guarded cul-de-sac with a single entrance and exit, surrounded on all sides by thick reinforced concrete and guarded round the clock by armed patrols with orders to shoot at sight. All the other buildings inside the cul-de-sac were occupied by trusted family members, his underboss and his capos. You would need a battalion of M1A2 Abrams to breach that security.

Find a similarity with “The Godfather”? I bet you do. Don Vito Corleone and Don Carlo Gambino are like mirror images of each other.

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At the height of his reign as Capo di Tutti Capi, Carlo Gambino is said to have amassed a fortune that was worth upwards of $50 billion. His underboss, Aniello Dellacroce, once quoted Gambino exclaiming exultantly,” Well, what do you know, we are bigger than US Steel!” (The line was later used by the character, Hyman Roth, in the Francis Ford Coppola hit The Godfather- Part II).

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Gambino could bear a grudge too, as was evident by the Scialo killing…….

A feared soldier of the Colombo crime family, Dominick Scialo, was once at a restaurant when he spotted Carlo Gambino and began to harass and insult him in front of others. Gambino kept his cool and did not say a word.

Scialo was not touched, not a hair on his head bent. Instead, some time later, he was grabbed as he was entering a Colombo family social club, driven to Brooklyn and gently set down inside an open space that had a flat concrete surface, enclosed by vertical wooden slats that stood upright.

It was the foundation of a high-rise under construction and as Scialo stood there trussed up like a chicken, concrete was poured over him. Gambino is reported to have stood over the guy and watched. Then, while his head was still clear, the gooey concrete now lapping against his chin, Gambino stooped and placed a cigarette between his gasping lips and said,” Here, have a drag. It will calm you down.”

Concrete shrinks as it hardens and sets. A human body placed inside concrete when it is still wet, would be crushed by the contraction caused by the drying, shrinking concrete. After Scialo’s execution, leaving victims untouched and alive inside setting concrete became the disposal mode of choice for the American mob.

(If you are walking by a construction site in Queens and you see the concrete churning on its own, inside the setting molds and you happen to hear wails and moans, like “Glub..glub… help..”, chances are good that the mixer operator is from Sicily.)

In 1969, Gambino became the ‘Chairman of the Board’ of what became known as the National Crime Syndicate or simply “The Commission”. And then in the early morning hours of Oct 15, 1976, he died of cardiac arrest at his home. The excitement of watching the New York Yankees winning the previous evening had gotten to him.

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Don Carlo Gambino lay in state inside a Brooklyn church for two days, so that thousands of ‘the faithful’ could come to pay their respects to the little, soft-spoken man. At the time of his death, the Gambino crime family was raking in $40-50 billion a year.

Don Carlo left his mark even at his own funeral. A number of unmarked cars stood on the opposite curb with FBI agents inside, filming the people going in and out. The FBI agents waited, shivering in the chill of the fresh October rain, unable to even get out to relieve themselves.

That’s when members of the Gambino crime family brought trays of lemonade and sandwiches to them and afterwards invited them in, to use the outhouse toilet at the back of the garden. Don Carlo had always reminded his men that the “FBI are doing their jobs, feeding their families, seeing their kids through school, just as we are…”