Joe Adonis was a major American crime-syndicate boss in New York and New Jersey. He was an important participant in the formation of the modern Cosa Nostra crime families.
Background
Joe Adonis was born Giuseppe Antonio Doto on November 22, 1902 in the Italian town of Montemarano, east of Naples. He was the son of Michele and Maria Doto. Several years after his birth (sources differ regarding whether he was seven or thirteen) his family moved to the United States, where they settled in Brooklyn, New York.
As a young man, Adonis supported himself by stealing and picking pockets.
While working on the streets, Adonis became friends with future mob boss Charles "Lucky" Luciano and mobster Settimo Accardi, who were involved in illegal gambling. Adonis developed a loyalty to Luciano that lasted for decades.
Education
Nothing is known about his education; presumably, he didn't even attend any educational institutions.
Career
Adonis was twenty-three when he was arrested for the first time, but the charges, auto theft and gun possession, were dismissed, setting a pattern that was to endure for the next quarter-century. During Prohibition Adonis was the bootlegging partner of several other rising young gangsters--"Lucky" Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and "Bugsy" Siegel--and he opened a speakeasy in Brooklyn called Joe's Italian Kitchen. It became popular with politicians as well as gangsters, and as such symbolized the easy relations between the two groups in Prohibition-era New York.
Adonis further muddied the line between the legitimate and the illegitimate by claiming to be the champion of Italian Americans. Adonis's bootlegging operation, which served some of Manhattan's most popular speakeasies, was termed the "Broadway Mob" by the press.
He also owned several businesses, including auto dealerships. In 1932 Harry Bennett of the Ford Motor Company gave a contract to haul new cars to Adonis's Automotive Conveying Company of New Jersey.
Adonis joined the Mafia as a member of the crime family headed by "Joe the Boss" Masseria, who was killed in 1931 during a power struggle with another boss, Salvatore Maranzano. Adonis was rumored to have been one of the gunmen who shot Masseria at the Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant in Coney Island, Brooklyn, on April 15.
Whatever his role, Adonis and several other of Masseria's young followers, including Luciano, joined Maranzano's crime network. Tensions soon developed between Maranzano and the Luciano-Adonis camp, and the younger mobsters struck first. A group of gunmen posing as policemen shot Maranzano to death in his office in the Grand Central Building in Manhattan on September 10, 1931. Mafia informer Joseph Valachi later testified that the murder was committed by Jewish gangsters hired by Luciano.
Luciano and his allies, including Adonis, became the most powerful racketeers on the East Coast. Adonis's criminal specialties included labor racketeering, political corruption, and gambling. His control of labor unions gave Adonis vast influence on Brooklyn's docks, and he was close to important politicians, such as William O'Dwyer, who eventually became Brooklyn district attorney and mayor of New York City. Adonis also had a string of illegal gambling parlors in greater New York and held an interest in several "carpet joints, " or illegal seasonal gambling casinos, such as the Piping Rock in Saratoga, New York, and the Colonial Inn in Hallandale, Florida.
In the mid-1930's the election of reformer Fiorello La Guardia as mayor of New York City and the appointment of Thomas Dewey as an independent state prosecutor drove Adonis from the city. He and his family moved from Brooklyn into a mansion on Dearborn Road in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from New York City via the new George Washington Bridge.
Adonis did business from the back room of a restaurant he owned in the neighboring community of Cliffside Park. Duke's, at 73 Palisades Avenue, became a New Jersey version of Joe's Italian Kitchen. Adonis regularly played host to other members of the New York underworld, such as Albert Anastasia and Willie Moretti, a killer who told a Senate committee that Duke's was "like Lindy's on Broadway. " Another mobster, Tony Bender, asserted his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination when asked if he'd ever been in Duke's.
After the United States entered World War II, military planners searched desperately for details about the coastal areas of Sicily. A Navy intelligence officer contacted Meyer Lansky, who passed the request on to his Italian partners. Adonis, Lansky later recalled, "dug up some foreign Italians and we brought them down together to 90 Church Street, " the headquarters of navy intelligence.
Although Adonis was commonly described as a social menace, Robert Lacey has argued convincingly in his Lansky biography that Adonis and his partners were primarily gaming entrepreneurs whose other crimes, from bribery to murder, usually were designed to protect and promote these gambling businesses. Adonis ran a club on the New Jersey Palisades, the Barn, which was famed for its high-stakes crap games. John Scarne, a professional gambling consultant, has called the Barn "the biggest moneymaker in [the] history of all illegal gambling casinos. "
He estimated the Barn's annual profits from craps at $10 million.
With notoriety came danger. When Senator Estes Kefauver's committee on organized crime held hearings in New York in 1950, Adonis refused to testify and was indicted for contempt. Shortly thereafter, in 1951, he was convicted in New Jersey on gambling charges and, for the first time in his life, went to prison.
In 1954 Adonis, who had never become a naturalized citizen, was convicted of perjury for twice having sworn under oath that he was born in Brooklyn. To avoid jail, Adonis returned to Italy in 1956. After a brief stay in Naples he moved to Rome, but was expelled by the police there for being "socially undesirable. "
He moved into an elegant apartment in downtown Milan, but was expelled from that city in 1971 for alleged Mafia activity. He was sent to Serra de Conti, a town near Ancona, and lived there under police surveillance until he died. His wife brought his body back to New Jersey for burial.
Achievements
Adonis was one of the assassins of crime czar Giuseppe Masseria in 1931, leading to Luciano’s supremacy in organized crime. As a rackets boss, Adonis specialized in labour racketeering, gambling, and hijacking.
Adonis is portrayed in the 1984 film Gangster Wars by James Percell, the 1991 film Bugsy by Lewis Van Bergen, and in the 1999 television movie Lansky by Casey McFadden and Sal Landi.
He was featured in the television documentary series American Justice and Making of the Mob: New York, which aired on AMC.
Personality
Adonis supposedly adopted his surname as a comment on his good looks, and he was known for his impeccable grooming and elaborate wardrobe. He also traveled in style; when he eventually was forced to leave the country, he did so in one of the best suites aboard the Italian liner Conte Biancamano.
Adonis undoubtedly possessed many business skills.
Connections
He had several glamorous girlfriends, including Virginia Hill, who later became famous as the paramour of Bugsy Siegel.
Adonis and his wife Joan had four children: Joseph A. Doto Jr. , Dolores Maria Olmo, Anna Arrieta, Elizabeth Doto, and actor Frank Adonis, who went on to play stereotypical gangster roles.
