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| - (Born 1923 - Died dec. 28, 2010) Was a founding member of the Jets street gang made famous in the musical West Side Story. And spent decades as a Genovese mobster who ruled the docks and was a favorite hitter for family boss Tony Salerno. he was also a World War II Veteran and later government informant. George was born in 1923, Bensonhurst. His father was Italian; his mother was Irish and Hungarian. His family moved to Chelsea when Barone was still in grade school after his father got a job as a watchman on the piers. Raised on the brawling West Side streets, the young George Barone could have stepped out of a frame of Angels With Dirty Faces, the 1938 Warner Bros. classic about tough New York street kids. He dropped out of high school to go to work, and then—in his first round of patriotic duty—signed up with the Navy after World War II broke out. Navy records show that he participated in five invasions, including Guam, Saipan, the Leyte Gulf, and Iwo Jima. He came home with a chestful of ribbons and a Good Conduct Medal. For a while, he lived up to those decorations. He tried his hand at school for a couple of years, attending what was then Pace Institute. He even worked for a time in an advertising company. But when that didn't take, he shipped out again, this time in the Merchant Marines. He had been at sea for two years and was docked in Naples when he busted his hand so badly in an accident that he couldn't work. Back on the West Side, he hooked up with some of his old pals from the neighborhood who were doing well, running the union locals that controlled the then bustling piers. There was Mickey Bowers, a "racket hoodlum" who ran the Upper West Side and whose union was dubbed the "Pistol Local" because guns settled most disputes there; there was Eddie McGrath, another "Irish local racketeer," and Harry Cashin, a union leader and family friend who got Barone his first work on the docks. Barone's job was to serve as hiring boss—the guy who chooses the crew for each day's work—for a company that cleaned staterooms on the steamship lines. When a union dissident named William Torres complained that he wasn't getting hired, Barone took offense. According to accounts of the February 1954 incident, Barone and a pair of union heavies challenged the dissident when they spotted him at 15th Street and Eleventh Avenue. "What are you doing, looking for trouble?" Barone reportedly yelled, and then took off after Torres, trapping him inside a meat market on West 14th Street, where he proceeded to beat him with an 18-inch-long metal bar. Torres took 10 stitches to close his wound, and Barone took a collar for felonious assault. Two months later, his lawyer worked some magic in Magistrate's Court and Barone was allowed to plead guilty to disorderly conduct and pay a $50 fine. Barone lost his job over the affair, and was forced to seek new employment. "What did you do after that?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Hayes asked Barone on the first day of his deposition. Barone answered, "I became a gangster." To do so, he hooked up with a new friend, an ex-con named Johnny Earle. The pair formed a gang, calling themselves the Jets—a name later made famous in West Side Story. They recruited a half-dozen other malcontents as members, including the Flynn brothers (Eddie and Terry), Georgie Blue, Mikey Ross, and a pint-sized kid named Little Larry Dentico, who later became a feared mobster. The budding gangsters were so tight with the longshoremen's union that they held their meetings at the ILA's old headquarters on West 14th Street, Barone testified. The Jets rumbled with other Irish and Italian gangs on the West Side, fighting for control of local rackets like numbers-running and loan-sharking. But their biggest haul was the $650,000 that Barone and Johnny Earle took off of a thief named Redmond "Ninny" Cribbens, who had stolen the money from a bank in Nassau County. Barone and Earle snuck into a cottage where Cribbens was hiding out and stole the money while the thief was away. Brute force, he found, was good for business. As the Jets' reputation grew, they attracted the attention of the Genovese crime family, long considered the savviest of the city's five Mafia tribes and always on the lookout for potential executive recruits. Barone and Earle dealt initially with Vito Genovese himself, meeting the dapper mob chieftain at his Thompson Street headquarters in Greenwich Village. They arranged a series of favors for him, including a sweetheart contract with an ILA local for a cargo-packing company Genovese owned. Genovese took a special liking to Earle, who had served time in prison with Genovese's hulking lieutenant, ex-fighter Vincent "Chin" Gigante, famous years later for his loony shuffles through the Village in a tattered bathrobe. The relationship ended abruptly, however, when a dissenting faction within the Jets— angry over the division of their spoils—decided in 1958 to hire a professional and profligate killer named K.O. Konigsberg to take out Earle. Years later, Konigsberg claimed to a detective that Barone had given him the gun for the hit. Barone stated in later life that "Johnny Earle was my best friend. Without him, I was nothing. The guy took me out of the gutter,". After Earle's death, Vito Genovese angrily broke off contact. "He just disowned us all and the Jets, including me. I was left wandering at sea, you might say." He soon found safe harbor at the clubhouse of another Genovese leader, the late Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, the cigar-chomping mob prelate who ruled from a chair on an East Harlem sidewalk. Barone found Salerno "very likable, very fair," and, most importantly, "powerful." He had come to understand the elements of power, he said. "I realized the Mafia was there, the most controlling factor on the waterfront in almost every area in the United States, the world, New York," Barone testified. "I had to get someplace." As part of his own self-improvement program, Barone said he undertook an in-depth study of business on the docks. Barone testified that during the ensuing years, he helped to negotiate favorable and profitable union contracts with all of the big companies that leased and repaired the new containers, arranging the placement of his underworld associates in key positions in both labor and management. It didn't hurt that Fat Tony Salerno understood little of the waterfront's business, other than that a lot of money was made there. In exchange for Salerno's support as he rose within the union, Barone said he was obligated to do his boss a few favors. What were they? "I assassinated a few people," he said and he didn't ask why, and for which he was not paid. But there were other rewards. Thanks to his mob benefactors, Barone said, he climbed steadily in the ranks of the ILA, from organizer to assistant general organizer for the international, to international vice president. An unbylined 1957 story in The New York Times described Barone as a rising star in the ILA. "Handsome, articulate, and ambitious," and despite his old assault case the article called him, "soft-spoken." He also won promotion within organized crime. It took a few years, but on a morning in the early 1970s, Barone said, he was told to report to an apartment on East 115th Street where, along with a handful of others, he was inducted in a formal ceremony into the Genovese crime family. It was a muted and businesslike affair. The initiation rites were cut short because the elderly Mafioso who officiated was too weak to conduct a full service. They celebrated afterward, Barone testified, by going out to breakfast. He flaunted his new power. When he heard that a young union official named Harold Daggett whom he had groomed for office had boasted while bending his elbow at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village that he was going to take over one of Barone's union locals, the gangster decided to teach him a lesson. He had an underling deliver Daggett to the darkened back room of a fruit-and-vegetable store in East Harlem where Barone assaulted him and threatened that Daggett would be killed if things were not straitened out years later Daggett—who is now a top official of the ILA and a contender to become the union's next president—turned on him again, by siding with rival gangsters. The Waterfront Commission, a bi-state agency created in the early 1950s to smoke out mob influence on the New York and New Jersey docks, tried to force Barone in 1960 to testify about the many convicted felons employed at the local unions he controlled, but Barone stayed mum. In 1967, the commission lifted his license to work on the piers, forcing him to relocate his main base of operations to Florida, where he helped organize an ILA local in the Port of Miami. But he kept up his ties to his New York friends. All that surveillance paid off a year later when Barone was one of 22 key waterfront figures who were charged with racketeering and extortion in a huge federal operation code-named Unirac. After a nine-month trial, Barone was convicted in 1979 on 18 counts, including shaking down businesses and taking kickbacks. He was sentenced to 15 years and fined $10,000. Through appeals, he got the term knocked down to 12 1/2. With good behavior, he was out in seven. Barone's activities and arrest in Miami alongside fellow mobsters Fred Fields and Bill Boyle were featured in the Documentary "Crime Inc. The Mob At Work" When he was released in 1990, he was 67 years old and much had changed. Salerno was in prison for life and soon to die, and so were many of Barone's old mob allies. But not everyone had abandoned the old man. A loyal pal named Jack McCarthy, a convicted labor racketeer and veteran Genovese associate, sent Barone $25,000 to help him out. The money was delivered to him in cash by Danny Kapilow, an ex–welterweight fighter. There was also a summons back to action by the new leaders of the Genovese mob, who sent an emissary to tell Barone that they wanted his help in obtaining jobs and business contracts in the Florida ports. Glad to be of use again, Barone lined up a cozy $160,000-a-year clerk's job with a major shipping company for the brother of Genovese acting boss Barney Bellomo's girlfriend, and arranged for Bellomo to open a check-cashing company on the Miami docks. The New York crew also ordered him to take on a much heavier lift: persuading union president John Bowers—son of Barone's old hoodlum pal Mickey Bowers—to back their candidate as the next ILA leader. At the time, Bowers was backing a Texas-based official named Benny Holland. Barone arranged to meet Bowers during an ILA convention in Miami at a Smith & Wollensky steak house. Bowers, who at 82 is still ILA president, has said he was tricked into attending the meeting and fled as soon as possible. For his part, Barone insisted that he was being a team player by promoting his old enemy Daggett for the union's top job. But he was also a senior citizen of organized crime, increasingly angry that he wasn't getting the respect he thought he deserved. And he had an old man's lack of patience for foolishness. Even when the fools were his Mafia bosses. His first clash with the new regime came after he was asked to use his influence to steer a lucrative union prescription-drug contract to a wiseguy-tied company. He agreed to convey the message. Then word came back that New York wanted a different company. He was told to help Andrew Gigante, the wealthy son of the then imprisoned Genovese boss, win a big container-repair contract for a company that Barone said owed him money from years ago. Barone said he had no use for the mob scion. Barone disliked the younger Gigante referring to him as "a drunk, a junkie," Barone sent word that he'd help out Gigante if he got the $90,000 he insisted he was owed by the repair company. When the firm's owner, an old-timer named Umberto Guido, allegedly came down to Florida to offer Barone $3,000 as a peace offering, Barone said he told Guido to tell Andrew Gigante to "stick it up his ass." That's not the way you're supposed to talk to the boss's son, even for a veteran geezer who had paid as many mob dues as Barone. The conflict between Barone and father and son Gigante quickly escalated, resulting in Barone being “put on the shelf”. Which meant he held no more power within the Mafia. He had become a pariah. And he knew that now that the mob no longer had any use for him, probably viewed him as a liability even, his time was surely up. He helped himself even less when he had the Miami ILA local pull a slowdown on Gigante's company. Barone didn't need much convincing that he was in trouble after this. First there was a suspiciously gracious offer to come up to New York and get the money he was owed. In classic Mafia style, the offer was relayed through one of his oldest friends, Jimmy Cashin, an ILA official whose father Harry had first put Barone to work on the docks. Cashin, however, loyally added a warning: saying "George, don't come. They're going to kill you. Everybody knows it." The same message was relayed by the son of another old friend. Glenn McCarthy, a labor consultant whose father Jack had helped Barone out when he got out of prison, met Barone at the Miami airport. Not long after those warnings, Barone was awakened in his apartment on the Venetian Causeway in Miami Beach by someone knocking on his window. It was an FBI agent and a Miami Metro cop, there with a warrant for his arrest for extortion. The charge stemmed from his demands for payment of the old debt from the container-repair company. He mulled over his options for a few days and then did the unthinkable. "I went bad," he said. “I wanted to get even. I wanted to survive. I didn't want to get killed by them,”. “I decided that the Mafia is not the paternal, wonderful organization that it proposes to be. The esprit de corps does not exist. Greed, violence, betrayal: that is what exists.” He signed a cooperation agreement with the government, pledging to tell all. But he declined to be placed in the Witness Protection Program. Becoming a turncoat was not easy for him. Barone said: 'They’ve been trying to kill me for years now. They haven’t made it yet and they’re not going to.' And he was right, George Barone died on December 28, 2010, at age 86. References [ ]
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