The Cleveland Clan

...Readers who find parts of it sordid may be interested to know that it was no less an American business leader than Mark Hanna who once said: "We are all pots and our bottoms are all sooty...

...C. W. GRIFFIN, JR...

...Messick credits Mark Hanna and his associates—the "Ohio Gang" that put Warren Harding into the White House—with fostering the atmosphere of corruption in Ohio and Washington which made possible the formation of the Cleveland Syndicate during Prohibition...

...ANNE CURTIN is a journalist with a background in publishing...

...By now the members of the Cleveland Syndicate had become rich enough to worry about one of the basic problems of legitimate big businessmen: legal tax avoidance...

...In tracing the rise of the Cleveland Syndicate, Messick has done a heroic job of research...

...Actually, the development of crime as a major industry in this country owes as much to the Irish and the Jews as it does to the Italians...

...Unfortunately, he has not distilled it well, and the main outlines of the story often become confused in a maze of unnecessary detail...

...The Cleveland Syndicate moved in by making a deal with the InterContinental Hotels Corporation, a subsidiary of Pan American World Airways, to open a gambling casino in Havana's renovated Hotel Nacional...

...All that remains, perhaps, is for future generations to turn them into folk heroes...

...By the time Joe Va-lachi introduced us to a new, romantic name for the Mafia—"La Cosa Nostra" —the legend had become so firmly established in our folklore that by now it is probably well beyond recall...

...The immigrant boys from Cleveland had realized the American Dream in all its up-to-date details...

...They engage in philanthropic and political activities, hobnob with the rich and powerful, and exert a great deal of behind-the-scenes influence...

...But through all the years of mounting success they never lose their modesty...

...As they reach maturity in the 1920's they spy a good opportunity in the illegal liquor business, and they form a partnership that lasts through four decades...

...Then, as business in alcohol declined, the syndicate developed its gambling interests...

...Wien erected a complicated corporate structure which enabled the syndicate to convert millions of dollars of income into capital gains, reducing the tax rate considerably...

...The transformation was complete...

...The syndicate in question was originally based in Cleveland, but it has since expanded into a far-flung business operation with multi-million dollar gambling interests that are now centered on Las Vegas, major real estate interests in Florida and Pennsylvania, and a variety of legal and extralegal interests somewhat closer to home...

...This, in essence, is the story that Hank Messick tells in The Silent Syndicate...

...As he points out, they do take advantage...

...His sense of moral outrage is abundantly clear, however, and it is particularly strong when it is focused on the large number of local, state, and Federal law enforcement officers and politicians who were corrupted by some of the profits from the syndicate's varied illegal operations...

...As Hank Messick abundantly shows in The Silent Syndicate, to treat American organized crime as a Mafia monopoly is vastly to underrate the acumen and enterprise which other ethnic groups brought to this flourishing industry...

...Eventually, they expand their joint business venture into a number of related fields, bringing jobs and prosperity to their friends and relatives, sending their sons to the best colleges, and making themselves respected leaders in a large and flourishing American industry...

...Showing their appreciation for brotherhood, they manage to bring order to a chaotic industry by forming a combination with their Italian and Irish colleagues, thus avoiding competition that might otherwise be murderous...

...But legal gambling became the biggest...

...JAMES B< ADLER is a book publisher and editor...

...Reviewed by James B. Adler /~\ne of our cherished American ^ myths is that the terms "Mafia" and "organized crime" are virtually synonymous...

...As a "crime crusader," he is also unhappy about judges who feel that criminals are entitled to the same legal safeguards in court as the rest of us...

...The story of The Silent Syndicate, while not well told, is nonetheless illuminating...

...The myth of the Mafia crime monopoly owes much to the Appalachian "gangland convention" of 1957, and perhaps even more to the melodramatic television series, "The Untouchables...

...Lansky and the Eastern Syndicate helped finance Batista's return to power in 1952, and in return Batista opened up Havana to legal gambling operated by American entrepe-neurs...

...First there was Las Vegas...

...The story is a complex one, and the book is often confusing because of Messick's seeming inability to distinguish between the significant detail and the trivial one...

...His present study of the Cleveland Syndicate —one of the most successful operations in the vice business—was made possible by a $25,000 Ford Foundation grant...

...Real estate was one...

...Other money was sequestered in foreign tax havens—Switzerland, Panama, and Nassau...

...We Americans have always respected business success...

...They avoid personal publicity, and they are willing to let others get the credit for their business accomplishments—provided that they get the cash...

...Restaurants, motels, laundries, horse breeding, and racing were others...

...Seen from this vantage point, The Silent Syndicate bears an almost embarrassing resemblance to one of those rags-to-riches sagas about immigrant boys making good in the land of promise: Four Jewish boys named Moe Dalitz, Louis Rothkopf, Sam Tucker, and Morris Kleinman—the sons of refugees from Russian anti-Semitism—grow up in the American Midwest...

...ERIK BARNOUW is a faculty member of the School of the Arts at Colummia...

...By the time they have achieved wealth and respectability, it hardly seems to matter that they have reached the top through careers in crime...

...Moving ever further afield from Cleveland, the syndicate was always careful to cover its own tracks by the clever use of "front men," and to enlist cooperation in new places by taking local men in as junior partners...

...Here the pioneer was Meyer Lansky, a long-time friend of Batista...

...THE REVIEWERS PETER MAYER is editor-in-chief of a New York publishing house and editor of a recent anthology, "The Pacifist Conscience," published by Holt, Rine-hart & Winston...

...But the broad outlines are immensely instructive...

...He tells a tale not of the criminal-as-mobster, but of the businessman-as-criminal...

...To start off as a robber baron is often to wind up as a folk hero...

...Then came Havana...

...is a free lance critic...

...He wrote "A Tower in Babel," the first of three volumes on the history of radio and television in the United States...

...They stick together, honoring obligations to each other without need of written contracts...

...For help they went to a sophisticated professional, and engaged the services of Lawrence A. Wien, the famous New York attorney who later sold the Empire State Building...

...This comfortable relationship lasted until the syndicate—with apparently greater foresight than many of our political experts on Caribbean affairs —saw the handwriting on the wall and managed to sell out at a profit just three months before Batista's fall...

...Messick is an investigative reporter who has been on what he calls a "crusade against crime" since he became involved in the campaign to clean up the wide-open city of Newport, Kentucky, almost ten years ago...

...By the late 1940's, the syndicate was beginning to look around to find legal outlets for the huge profits it had amassed in liquor and gambling...

...As Messick traces the careers of these men and their associates, he pays close attention to the details of their commercial transactions...

...JAMES NELSON GOODSELL is Latin American correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor...