Cleveland‘s Notorious Mob Boss – The Rise and Fall of James T. Licavoli
A Savage Reign Over Northeast Ohio Crime
Shadowy figures tucked away in dimly-lit back rooms, making blood pacts over liquor and cigars. Murders carried out in broad daylight, aggressive territorial grabs and plenty of dirty money sloshing around. This might sound like a page straight from mafia pulp fiction, but for much of the 1900s, Cleveland served as an epicenter for just this kind of activity with the Licavoli crime family at the peak of power and influence.
James T. Licavoli stood as the notorious public face of this clan, ruling over an organization that managed to penetrate deep into the city’s political, business and law enforcement spheres. As the top mob boss throughout the late 1960s and into the 70s, his was a savage reign marked by both dizzying success and a brutal downfall that included rebellions, assassinations and landmark prosecutions.
Licavoli’s Mentor John Scalish Opens the Gates
Before the likes of Licavoli, the Mayfield Road Gang and Lonardo brothers dominated Cleveland’s scattered bootlegging and criminal rackets in a hotly contested fashion during Prohibition. As the iconic mafia structure of families and syndicates crystallized across the nation, local mobster John Scalish worked through the 30s and 40s to bring order to the underworld landscape.
Scalish himself emerged from a life of small-time crime running gambling rackets and serving as a driver for Cleveland mob pioneers like Alfred Polizzi. Using his role as a point man between powerful New York and Chicago mafia interests, Scalish negotiated a centralized operation for Cleveland and acted as a buffer between outside meddling. This allowed him to formalize The Combination, bringing together the previously warring East Side Porrello and West Side Lonardo factions along with other gangs.
With Scalish as the shot-caller, Cleveland became a hotbed of mob activity. The new regime muscled out most independent black racketeers, absorbed rivals like the Mayfield Road Gang and built up a far-reaching bookmaking syndicate across Ohio drawing in an estimated $5 million in profit annually. These spoils enriched the families in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Columbus and Youngstown. From his plush office inside the Statler Hotel, Scalish managed an empire and enjoyed enough leverage with the national mafia commission by 1944 to declare sovereignty over the territory and run the streets as “God.”
And within this regime a young James T. Licavoli earned his stripes. During Prohibition‘s heyday in the 1920s and 30s, Licavoli jumped right into bootlegging and petty crimes under Scalish‘s stewardship. Beyond just getting his hands dirty, Scalish made sure Licavoli learned the ins and outs of running illicit gambling and loansharking operations – the financial foundations of the mob. These mentored skills ensured Scalish left the organization in good hands.
Early Days of Organized Crime – Extortion, Robberies and Murder
As a young tough under Scalish in the 1930s, Licavoli dove right into the most ruthless elements of organized crime. Police first arrested an 18-year-old Licavoli for murder in 1934, but the charges didn’t stick due to witness intimidation and conveniently disappearing evidence. Licavoli later spent two years in jail on suspicion of four other homicides, though authorities again struggled to build a prosecutable case against the lawyered-up mafia crews.
After release from prison in 1941, Licavoli swiftly ascended the Cleveland mafia hierarchy under boss Scalish. Police connected Licavoli to the violent, extortion-centered United Construction Company, eventually shut down by authorities. He also ran with a ruthless booster gang robbing rail yards and stores receiving plunder from these jobs. This outfit proved so terrifying that one railroad owner sold his whole operation just to rid himself of their impact.
Beyond these strongarm criminal activities, Licavoli earned experience running numbers and bolita illicit gambling operations for Scalish before trying his hand at “softer” rackets like loansharking which proved extremely lucrative. A typical loanshark book could include anywhere from 50 to 200 debtors making high interest payments every week. By the late 1950s, Licavoli served as a capo overseeing all these gambling and “juice” loan operations generating piles of cash.
Seizing Youngstown – Enforcer to Kingpin
As a rising star within the Scalish regime, Licavoli moved from Cleveland into the smaller rust belt city of Youngstown in the 1950s. He soon built a fearsome reputation as a terrifying figure that you avoided crossing at all costs. These skills made him useful when Scalish wanted to extend his reach eastward beyond Cleveland.
At the street level, Licavoli muscled his way into controlling Youngstown gambling operations worth millions. He dominated neighborhood wire rooms for horse race and sports betting and flooded the streets with numbers games. Licavoli also monopolized the vending machine and jukebox “protected territories” crucial for laundering street cash. Any bar owners defying Licavoli or refusing to use his coin-operated suppliers faced grave consequences.
With the full backing of Cleveland, Licavoli quickly gained supremacy over all Youngstown underworld rackets typically through violent coercion or bribing police and politicians. Such strongarm tactics still held dangers. In one infamous episode, Licavoli enforced for Cleveland mob ally Moe Dalitz against a pair of brothers named the Bonarrigos running corn liquor in rural Ohio.
When Licavoli and his gang took the brothers for an ominous “one way ride,” one came out shooting, killing four including Scalish‘s nephew. Only Licavoli crawled from the bloody attack alive. Yet instead of backing down, Dalitz and Licavoli burned one brother’s house down (he wasn‘t there) and eventually hunted down and eliminated the entire Bonarrigo clan. This again spotlighted Licavoli’s special skills as an enforcer and his high tolerance for violence.
From Youngstown, Licavoli launched operations with Cleveland‘s backing to take over rackets throughout lower Ohio‘s Mahoning Valley. Despite being based outside the city limits, he served as a “secret kingpin” reporting directly to bosses in Cleveland. As a top earner he funneled over $5 million annually up the hierarchy from criminal activities like drug trafficking and murder for hire. Licavoli himself lived lavishly on his 35% cut of earnings – he once accrued $15,000 in expenses on a stolen credit card during a Florida vacation. When authorities came asking questions, none of his “friends” could recall details.
Rebellions Threaten the Throne
After the death of longtime Godfather Scalish in 1976, James T. Licavoli seemed poised to take over as capo di tutti capi. From his base in Youngstown he had expanded operations throughout the region and oversaw a lethal crew of 300 made men while earning huge sums, making him an obvious heir.
But stepping into Scalish‘s shoes after three decades of stable rule provoked undercurrents of resentment. Rival factions saw weakness in the transition. Jewish gangster and Cleveland city councilman John Nardi teamed up with brash Irish mobster Danny Greene to take matters into their own hands.
In the brutal power struggle that followed, car bombs and assassinations decimated Licavoli’s key supporters including Underboss Leo “Lips” Moceri, killed by a Greene associate hiding in the bushes outside his house. Greene himself proved impossible to kill despite a dozen attempts with guns, bombs and even a bungled poisoning. It didn‘t help that a 1977 federal bust of a major mafia gathering in upstate New York included wiretaps of Licavoli threatening to demote capos not paying their dues to him. This defiance amplified unrest in the ranks.
As the streets became a battlefield, it first seemed the cunning Danny Greene had the edge over Licavoli with his ruthless bombing campaign targeting Licavoli holdings like Kings Clover massage parlor. Cleveland police even arrested Licavoli himself for one bombing though he skated away without charges thanks to crooked cops.
But the former enforcer for Scalish still had plenty of tricks left up his sleeve from a long, violent career. And he still controlled the core Cleveland family structure backing his plays.
The Octopus Extends Its Tentacles into Law Enforcement
Amidst the chaos on the streets, James T. Licavoli made what seemed like a foolish choice to outsiders– in 1978 he brought in convicted bank robber Angelo “Big Ange” Lonardo as underboss to shore up support and handle retribution. But Lonardo in fact turned the tide coordinating Greene‘s murder through a hit squad in 1977. Licavoli gunmen had tried to eliminate Greene over 12 times in the past without luck. But Lonardo’s imported Chicago talent got the job done, taking out their biggest adversary.
Just as importantly, years of flooding cash to run Youngstown as an open city saturated with corruption paid dividends. Licavoli successfully brought multiple lawmen onto the payroll through bribery and extortion. Licavoli even infiltrated Cleveland FBI offices by compromising clerk Louise Fuca. Fuca stole documents from informant files and upcoming indictments, information that made its way to Licavolioften hours after it was created.
Fuca proved just one asset among many allowing Licavoli’s organization to operate with near impunity. These crucial information flows combined with liberal payoffs helped the mob boss evade charges ranging from gambling and robbery to assaults and murder. This level of operational penetration into the justice system proved ambitious. With cops, judges and even federal agents on the payroll, government investigations spoiled at each turn thwarted by moles inside the system. But an airtight machine so reliant on graft could only last so long until the next ambitious prosecutor came along.
Downfall Under New RICO Laws
At the federal level, prosecutors started pushing for conspiracy cases to take down entire organizations instead of chasing street crimes with more difficult standards of proof. Mob turncoats and wiretaps (like those from the 1977 raid) fueled suspicion that mafia families operated as unified, continuous criminal enterprises.
This theory led to 1970s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) laws allowing groups to be tried together for patterns of crime. Top charges in the eventual Licavoli case included 21 murders, drug sales, illegal gambling profits and bribing police. So while Cleveland law enforcement remained severely compromised (police chief Richard Hongisto once had to take command himself to arrest Licavoli), federal authorities had wider latitude and better resources to attack systemic corruption.
| Charge | Defendants | Guilty Verdicts |
|---|---|---|
| Operating as illegal enterprise | 17 | 13 |
| Murder, attempted murder | 14 | 8 |
| Conspiracy, racketeering | 15 | 10 |
| Bribery, extortion | 6 | 3 |
In 1982 a new indictment invoked RICO to hit Licavoli for operating the Cleveland family as a corrupt, continuous criminal entity – exactly what the law aimed to combat. With rock solid charges for once, in 1984 James T. Licavoli and 16 high-ranking members were convicted. The formerly teflon mob boss received 17 years himself after being named as the leader behind murder for hire, drug sales and bribing officials.
Licavoli‘s stranglehold over northeast Ohio territories like Youngstown closed for good. And his absence created a power void that, after some initial underworld clashes, allowed room for new factions to rise establishing control for another generation. Unlike Licavoli, later mob bosses Ray T. Sciortino and Russell Papalardo operated under tighter scrutiny and scrutiny from local leadership. Both ended up behind bars from 1996-7 thanks to a renewed task force.
So while a few scraps of the old regime still cast shadows over Cleveland‘s streets even in the modern day, the likes of the vicious, defiant and flamboyant Licavoli remain historical anomalies. For residents living under Boss Licavoli‘s 1970s reign of car bombs and bullets, the memories of violence, corruption and fear will linger even as new bosses continue his legacy.