I believe the foundation of the American economy and politics rests on a contradiction. For example, it is legal for the most profitable industry in the world (oil) to skim off $ 4 billion in profit before taxes, but if an individual should protest this “depletion allowance” by refusing to pay for a $40 fill up, the police will rush to arrest them, guns drawn. The real crime in America is to not stealing enough.
Consider the rise and fall of Hugh Joseph Addonizio (above). When asked why, after twelve years as a respected congressman, he decided to run for mayor of Newark, the short, bald, bullnecked blunt man they called “The Pope of New Jersey” explained, “There's no money in being a congressman, but you can make a million bucks as mayor of Newark" Over two terms, from 1962 to 1969, Mayor Addonizio made more than a million dollars. But that was still not enough.
At the end of February 1959, after Jewish mobster Abner Zwillman, was found hanging by the neck in his West Orange apartment - just after receiving a subpoena to testify before a grand jury - a 60 year old Genovese crime family capo named Richie-”the-boot”- Boiardo (above) was given sole permission to plunder Newark.
Richie (above) earned his moniker because he avoided wiretapping prosecutors by using public pay-phone booths. In Jersey parlance, Richie was always “in da boot”. It was a very profitable place for Richie to be.
During the late 1040's and early 1950's, Newark invested heavily in urban renewal, replacing thousands of substandard single family homes with 46 huge impersonal substandard apartment blocks. The construction of those buildings proved a gold mine for organized crime.
These new white elephants were badly built, but the graft from their construction allowed Richie the Boot to build a "Transylvanian traditional" mansion and estate in Livingston, New Jersey. He adorned the gated entrance with a garish statue of himself astride a horse (above), towering over a row of busts of his children, resembling, to my mind, clowns in an amusement park game ready to be shot with water pistols. And in a position of honor, at Richie's foot was the effigy of his eldest son Anthony, aka "Tony Boy".
Tony Boy (above) took over the family business just as a long planned Southside Sewer project was finally getting started. The primary contractor was Paul Rigo, who claimed he had founded his company after winning $65,000 in the Irish Sweepstakes. He pleaded with Richie "The Boot" to lower his required kickback to 5%, but Richie insisted, “You'll pay 10%, or I'll break both your legs.” Then Tony Boy offered a solution,
Tony Boy set up a shell company called Kantor Supply. The subcontractors all paid their kickbacks with regular business checks. Kantor Supply would then issue invoices to match those payments. Rigo could use his construction company to launder that cash before distributing it to Richie, Tony Boy and “The Pope”, Mayor Addonizio. For this service, Rigo could keep 10% of everybody's kick, making a hell-of-a profit for himself.
There were just three problems with this gravy train express. First, there has never been honor among thieves. After all, they not only steal for a living they also steal out of habit. Secondly, Tony Boy was seeing a psychiatrist, and some of his soldiers had taken to calling him “nut case.” Another of Tony Boy's soldiers, Anthony “Little Pussy” Russo (above), even called him a “weasel”, and referred to “The Boot” as “the most treacherous fucker in the world”. And fourthly, there was a real Kantor behind Kantor Supply. Plumber Irving Kantor took a 5% cut for running the shell company, but he was not a healthy man. And unhealthy men are prone to soul cleansing confessions. And lastly, in part because of all the graft, Newark was not a healthy city.
By 1965 Newark was half Italian and half African American, and burdened with an astronomical tax rate, thanks to all those kickbacks. The manufacturers in Newark, who had once paid middle class salaries, had moved south to find lower taxes. The local unemployment rate was over 8%, and among young black men in Newark it was almost 40%. Ten percent of the city residents survived on welfare. Of the 136,000 apartments in the city, over 40,000 of which (mostly those (above) built by Richie Boiardo ), were substandard or dilapidated.
On that hot, humid night, two Newark Police Officers, John DeSimone and Vito Pontrelli, pulled over a taxi at the corner of 15th Avenue and South 9th Street. According to the officers, the cab had illegally passed them on the right side. According to the taxi's African-American driver, John Smith (above) the police car was double parked.
Half an hour later, when a crowd saw the bleeding driver dragged into the 4th Precinct station, it set off six days and nights of looting and burning that left 26 people dead, and $10 million in property damage. The root cause of the Newark Riot, said a Governor's commission, was a “pervasive feeling of corruption” in Newark. The most common phrase heard around town was “Everything in city hall is for sale.”
The Essex county prosecutor now empaneled a grand jury to investigate the new summer home Mayor Addonizio had just bought with a loan from Paul Rigo. But the minute that happened, Richie and Tony Boy were aware of it. One of Tony's soldiers, John “Big Pussy” Russo (above), bluntly warned Paul Rigo “Keep your mouth shut.”
And when the mayor was served with a subpoena, Rigo found a note in his car which read, "This could have been a bomb. Keep your mouth shut." Not surprisingly Rigo lied to the grand jury. Then the IRS subpoenaed the books for Kantor Supply.
Caught in a three way squeeze between the mob,. the feds and the grand jury, Paul Rigo asked his lawyer to cut a deal with the feds. Almost immediately, Rigo received a phone call, telling him bluntly, “Keep the hell away from the federal building!”. When he realized there must be a leak in the prosecutor's office, Paul Rigo was on the next plane for Acapulco.
From Mexico Paul Rigo called a high powered lawyer in Washington, D.C.. and through him revealed to the feds that he had a diary, recording in code every sub contractor who paid kickbacks, when and how much, and every mobster and politician who received cash, dates, and amounts. Addonizio (above) was dragged back to the U.S. and given a seat in front of the grand jury. This time, “The Pope” took the fifth amendment. It didn't help. Addonizio was indicted along with 11 others, for 65 counts of money laundering, extortion, tax fraud, and perjury.
Even that didn't stop him from mounting a campaign for a third term as mayor. He would eventually lose the job, but even while on trial Hugh Addonizio won 45% of the vote.
The trial began with Irving Kantor, testifying from his hospital bed. The dying man recounted his phone conversations with Richie “the Boot”, and how he handed the cash over to Paul Rigo, for distribution.. Rigo testified for two straight weeks, detailing many late night meetings in empty offices. It was during one of those meetings that Rigo told Addonizio, I don't know why in the world you ever left Washington and a nice job in Congress to come up here in this mess.” Addonizio (above) had replied, “Simple. There's no money in Washington, but you can make a million bucks as mayor of Newark.”
The case was handed to the jury just before 5:00 pm, 22 July, 1970. They were back by midnight. Their verdict was guilty for all the defendants on all counts. Two months later the judge sentenced Addonizio and Richie the Boot to ten years in prison and $25,000 each in fines, each.
It wasn't a bad outcome for the mayor, really. Convicted of “literally delivering Newark into the hands of organized crime”, and for the bargain basement price of a million dollars, Hugh Addonizio could almost pay the fine out of petty cash. It was the tax penalties that took most of his money, On the bright side, after just five years, Addonizo was released on parole. In "retirement" he bred and raced homing pigeons. Not the sport of kings, but evidently the sport of Popes.
Anthony “Tony Boy” Boiardo also died of a heart attack, on 20 April, 1978. Just a year later, the big mouth, Anthony “Little Pussy” Russo, was found in his bathrobe and slippers, with three bullets in his brain. He'd been killed by three members of his own crew, who shot him and then stole cash and property from his house. A day after his body was discovered and removed, the assassins broke back into the murder scene, and returned the property. But they kept the money.
The longest living of the conspirators was Richie-”the-boot”- Boiardo (above) . After Tony Boy's death he rarely left his Livingston estate, tending his tomatoes under a sign that read “The Godfather's Garden”, as Richie was convinced he had been the role model for the infamous literary and movie gangster, Vito Corleone. The Boot suffered a heart attack and died in November of 1984, at the age of 95 - just another crook who had not stolen enough to become a hero of capitalism. Crime, you see, does not pay. But politics does, and well enough to make it's crimes legal.
- 30 -
To the California Fish and Game Department the worry was that once these piscatorial carnivores had finished off the Trout they would swim downstream on the Feather River, into the Sacramento and then upstream to devour the Delta Salmon fry populations, which The California Fish and Game Department had just spent tens of millions of dollars re-introducing. So, beginning in 1997 officials spent something in excess of $24 million trying to kill off these finned invaders from Minnesota and that effort didn't prove to be fun for anybody, except possibly the Pike.
The Northern Pike of Lake Davis were poisoned. They were electrocuted. They have been shot, netted, hooked, cornered, dynamited, starved and suffocated. The state even drained the lake. For over a year the nearby human population couldn’t drink the water, it was so full of piperonyl butoxide. The pike barely noticed the stuff.
Sometimes it seemed that the "experts" were hunting down the pike individually, one at a time, to beat them to death with sticks and clubs. It was like trying to control flies with a fly swatter. It seems to have just ticked them off.
These Franken-Pike refused to die. They weren't on any endangered species list, they’re on the ten most wanted list. They’ve had more people gunning for them than Osama bin Laden, and for years with about as much luck .
When nothing else worked California Fish and Game tried stocking Lake Davis with oversized Trout fry, thinking they would be too big for the young Pike fry to eat and the Pike would then starve to death or be eaten by the giganto-trout. But in response the Pike began growing nine to fourteen times faster than normal. They became super-pike fry-enators: big nasty Pike that had no trouble swallowing the Trout of unusual size.
Six hundred Pike were caught in Fish and Game sample nets the year after the lake was poisoned. In 2004 the catch was 17,635. In all, something over 65,000 Pike have been pulled from Lake Davis since humans began trying to eradicating them, and God knows how many sacrificial Trout. But however many it was, it wasn't enough.
Meanwhile, at the same time, biologists were raising endangered California condor chicks. They were even using hand puppets to feed the baby vultures, so they would have no positive human interaction before they were released. But despite these efforts about a half dozen of the first juvenile Condors freed in the wild chose to hang out at the Pine Mountain Club, a condo resort village down the road from Fraser Park, at the Western
One “naturalist” studying the Condor-condo interactions returned home after a hard day of remote Condor observing via powerful binoculars to discover three of the 30 pound birds and their 10’ wingspans, gallivanting about his bedroom, using it as a sort of playroom and free toilet. They had entered via a slit they made in his window screen. One was in his underwear drawer shredding his shorts while the other two were slowly dissecting his mattress with all the abandon of adolescences free from parental oversight. It almost looked as if the birds had picked out this guy personally to deliver the message; "Stop watching us, you eco-papparazi!" Now the average citizen, like say maybe Russel Crowe, would have gone into that room with a broom and defended his privacy, and he would driven those feathered gangbangers out the way they had come in!
But this guy was a “naturalist”. So, to avoid human interaction with the feathered truants he retreated until the birds got bored and left on their own. The “naturalists” then convinced local politicians to require all trash to be held inside until the morning of collection, and then placed only in locking containers. And at the landfill a bulldozer would immediately cover the trash bags with dirt.
The thinking was that without an easy food supply the condors would return to their natural behaviors. Instead the Condor youth gangs’ response was to loom about on the roof of a local restaurant, depressing the hell out of potential customers. The condors were actually waiting for the trash trucks to arrive. They would then use their extraordinary skills at gliding to follow behind the trucks all way to the dump, where they quickly descended on the leftover meat and soup cans and macaroni and cheese containers as if they were a dinning on a dead wooly mammoth. The front loaders couldn’t cover the trash bags without the risk of burying a condor at the same time, so the meals could now be eaten at leisure in a sort of Condor olfactory buffet. Game, set, and match to the Condors.
The biologists and naturalists were horrified because it didn’t fit their image of noble Condors sailing in an empty sky above an untouched wilderness - which is where the Condors almost became extinct in the first place. Need I point out that not a single condor died at the Pine Mountain Club? They ate too many French fries but none of them died!
The happy ending to this story of rebellious Condors is that once they matured and mated the adult condors didn’t want their offspring growing up in an urban environment anymore than Republicans do. Today, the Pine Mountain Club is condor free, except for a few weeks 
Now, I’m not suggesting we try protecting endangered species with dynamite or by raising their cholesterol levels, but it does seem that the animals we’re protecting are all in trouble while the ones we’re trying to exterminate are experiencing population booms. What can we learn from this? Well, that there are almost seven billion humans on this planet at present and baring a natural disaster or WMD we are not going anywhere. And if we do, so are the Condors and most of the Pike and Trout. Modern Condors, searching for dinner while soaring above the wilderness are going to see a lot more humans than dead deer. And Pike and Trout are going to meet a lot of little fish with hooks in them. So why not “humanize” them, teach them what every mentally challenged pigeon already knows; the fries are better at Burger King, don’t drink the yellow water, never trust a politician in an election year and don’t go swimming in Lake Davis unless you want your talons bitten off.
