Hollywood and the Mob [antikvár]

Introduction When my mother and father first visited New York in 1957 there was such a commotion outside their hotel one morning that, at first, my mother thought Marilyn Monroe had arrived. Then, through a window to the left of the hotel lobby, she caught a glimpse of a dead man sprawled in a barber's chair. What my mother had witnessed was the murder of Mafia gangster Albert Anastasia. Anastasia's nicknames in the Mafia were 'the Executioner' and 'the Mad Hatter'. Comedian Jerry Lewis remembered playing the Copacabana Club in New York in the 1950s, and making fun of a man in the audience. What Lewis did not realise was that his victim was Anastasia. Dean Martin stepped in to cut his pal off before he said something stupid. Years later, Lewis remembered being onstage that night - although he could not see him, the comedian could feel, as he put it, the gangster's cold steel eyes hitting him like bullets. The gangster's wealth came from his control of Brooklyn's docks, at the time the entry point for almost all imports into the USA (and most exports leaving it). The forty thousand dock-workers (longshoremen) who operated the three hundred deep-water ports along the Brooklyn waterfront were ultimately under Anastasia's control. Dockworkers took what they wanted - or 'boosted', in Mafia parlance - before loading goods onto ships, passing loot back up to their Mafia overseers. On the Waterfront