Entering the United States in 1895 from Italy with his parents and older brother, Eddy, when he was only four years old, Frank Costello eventually became a figure disdained by his native country and pursued relentlessly by his adopted home. Known as the "Prime Minister of the Underworld," Costello was a key member of the organized crime syndicate's Genovese Crime family, and responsible for most of the slot machines run across the country. By 1943, Costello was the "Boss of All Bosses." With the famed Charles "Lucky" Luciano in jail and Vito Genovese hiding out in Sicily, Costello ran New York. Tammany Hall was still the political machine that elected mayors and judges, and Costello was the man behind the power of Tammany Hall. The irony of taking control of the Irish political power was never lost on Costello, who had felt abused by the Italian struggle with the Irish in his early East Harlem days.
Born Francesco Castiglia on January 26, 1891, in Cosenza, Calabria, in southern Italy, Costello grew up in Greenwich Village and East Harlem in New York City and was a member of the notorious 104th Street Gang, a group of young Italian criminals. Never completing education beyond elementary school, Costello was first arrested at 17 for assault and robbery and again when he was 21. Two years after that, in 1915, he was sentenced to a year in the penitentiary for carrying a revolver. In 1925, Costello became a U.S. citizen following a naturalization hearing at which he declared himself a real estate operator. In fact, he was a bootlegger. That lie ultimately led to the revocation of his citizenship, a verdict upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1961, a decade after he was hurled into particular prominence during the Senate Crime Investigations headed by Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver.
The drama unfolded in households across the United States, as the Kefauver hearings gained prominence equal to those of the McCarthy "Red Scare" hearings only a couple of years earlier. But even before those hearings and the legal retribution for his years running multi-million dollar gambling and other criminal enterprises, Costello was denounced by New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia who personally led police raids on the seizure and destruction of his slot machines. In 1935, Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, who was corrupt in his own right, invited Costello to take his slot machines to New Orleans. By 1939 Costello was tried for tax evasion pertaining to a hidden income of $798,000. The government lost the case due to lack of evidence.
The paradox to Costello's fame as an underworld figure was his longing to be accepted by people other than racketeers and corrupt politicians. Not long after his fiftieth birthday Costello consulted a psychiatrist because of his nagging inadequacy. Later, he became a regular figure at the prominent Waldorf-Astoria hotel, frequenting its dining rooms and bars. But from 1951 until his citizenship revocation was upheld in 1961, whatever comfort Costello received from his attempt at normalcy was repeatedly shattered by endless indictments and several prison and jail terms. After he was released from Rikers Island on a second contempt sentence, he was in the news again in 1970 when he answered a subpoena issued by a grand jury in New York County reportedly investigating gambling. Costello claimed to be retired; he insisted he knew nothing more of such activities than anyone else. His preferred activities at that time were reported to be gardening at his Long Island home and showing his flowers in local flower shows. Six months later, Costello was alleged to have emerged from retirement, although reluctantly, to oversee the city's underworld operations, without an obvious leader since Genovese's death in 1969. Eleven days after an apparent heart attack in his Central Park West home, Costello died at Doctors Hospital in New York City on February 18, 1973. His wife, Loretta, was his only survivor. He is buried in St. Michael's Cemetery in Astoria, Queens, New York.
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