My Grandfather. And the Mafioso

My Uncle N. has long told a story about living in Detroit as a kid. He was the only one old enough among the sibs to remember this particular incident, he was 11 when it happened. And the story is a beaut. In my family history research I naturally went to find out more about it and the facts are even better than the part of the history we know about.

Let’s start out with the family story. Uncle N. remembers a night when an Italian American neighbor  went up and down the street apologizing for the disturbance that the bomb that someone tried to throw into his house had caused. The sloppy hit men nailed a neighbor’s porch instead. Porch. Gone. Mr. L paid for the damage and assured the porchless neighbor that such a thing would never happen again. The family story goes on to mention a story in the paper a few days later about bodies found in the Detroit River….

I checked out a book from the library called Motor City Mafia: A Century of Organized Crime in Detroit by Scott M. Burnstein and looked up the Mr. L family in the Detroit City Directory for 1954 (the incident took place in 1954 or 1955).  I didn’t necessarily expect to find a rich history about the Mr. L family. I mean, family history is often a lot of reading for little  information, but this turned out to be wonderfully fascinating.

Now, I couldn’t verify about the bodies in the Detroit River independently, but I found much more. The Detroit City Directory confirmed the Mr. L family did indeed live just down the street from my grandparents. Always known as Mr. L. to the children, I found his first name was Sam and his wife was Ann. And, get this for a detail, Mr. L was a union rep for the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

According to Motor City Mafia, the L. family was a big deal in the Detroit mafia for generations, from early Prohibition into at least the 1980s (the Detroit mafia as a whole, began to fall apart in the 1990s). The two founding brothers of the L. family lead the most powerful gang in the city in the early 1930s, working large-scale liquor smuggling from Ontario, along with two other families. The book referred to the L’s as “bootlegging czars.”

Later in Prohibition, after a gang war, when a new figure ascended to head all of Detroit’s mafia vice, the new mob boss put one of the L’s in charge of the new larger crime family’s financial affairs.

Uncle N. remembers playing with children from both the Mr. L family and an additional family, the Mr. T family. In fact, the Mr. T family came to visit my grandparents and the kids after they moved from Detroit. He remembers both men as friendly, good neighbors and good fathers who encouraged games among the kids like stickball and threw barbeques in the back yard. Just normal families. We don’t know where these two men fell in the crime family’s hierarchy. High enough to warrant a murder attempt, that much we know. No T family was listed anywhere in the Detroit directory, although they did live there, and Uncle N. remembers them. Mr. T ran a landscape company. In fact, he took care of Mr. L’s yard.

According to Motor City Mafia, it turns out one of the Mr. Ts was consigliari in the underworld.

One member of the L. family went on to be the boss of the Cleveland mafia in the later 1950s. Others stayed and on in Detroit, one eventually imprisoned in 1982 “for his role in [a] bloody feud and soon thereafter became the nation’s first mob boss ever convicted under the highly influential Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICCO) statute.”

Bootlegging czars, bombs, unions, and consigliaris. The truth was even better than the family legend. Now how often does that happen?