Chapter Three in a five-part series on the heyday of New Haven’s mob: J. Edgar Hoover puts Salvatore “Midge Renault” Annunziato in his sights. He goes to jail … sort of. Midge suffers a family tragedy. He goes to federal prison, but not before flexing his power once again. Midge meets his nemesis, a New Haven cop named Stephen Ahern.
(See previous installment here.)
1957 – 1963
On Nov. 14, 1957, a state trooper in Apalachin, a small town near Binghamton, N.Y., noticed a steady stream of limousines driving into a country estate. He decided to investigate. The arrival of the police sent dozens of sharply dressed men fleeing into the woods. Mafiosi from every corner of the country, including some of the nation’s most noted gangsters, had converged on the estate for a high level conference. The state troopers eventually rounded up 63 men, interrogated them and let them go because there was no evidence they had committed any crime. The raid caused a media firestorm, humiliating FBI head J. Edgar Hoover. He had long denied the existence of the mafia. Hoover demanded information on the arrestees and discovered the FBI had little. He immediately created the Top Hoodlum program. Each FBI office was ordered to identity 10 “top hoodlums” and gather information on them.
The New Haven FBI office designated Salvatore “Midge Renault” Annunziato and Ralph “Whitey” Tropiano “Top Hoodlums” and went to work. By Christmas, they had compiled a 25 page-plus report on Midge and sent it to Hoover.
Hoover, however, deemed it “inadequate.” He wrote a scathing five-page letter ripping it apart. Agents needed to learn more about Midge’s mistress Angela, his association with Whitey and especially his activities with the Operating Engineers, which Hoover identified as most likely to yield a prosecution. “It is expected that in the future you will give this matter your close personal attention to be sure this program is given adequate attention in your office,” Hoover wrote. “It is your personal responsibility to see that each agent assigned to this program is conscientiously and thoroughly investigating all phases of the subject’s activities.” The New Haven FBI office dug deep into Midge’s past and present. The office sent Hoover sometimes-weekly updates and reports — one exceeding 150 pages. Agents blanketed the city and the region, combing school records, credit records, bank records, arrest and prison files, anything they could find on Midge. They talked to cops, informants, contractors, union officials, friends, men who’d been beat up, robbed or shaken down. They obtained Midge’s phone records. No piece of information was too trivial. One report informed Hoover that Midge had spent $60 on vitamins the year before and worked at the New Haven Trucking Company for two weeks in 1940. Whitey got similar treatment. Agents began tailing both men. Surveillance of Whitey turned up little. Midge was another story. Agents followed him for five straight days in 1958. Every day, he left Angela’s in his car, even though his license was suspended. They followed him as he went to the union hall, visited job sites, including the Hamden Middle School, and restaurants where he had meetings with union officials or others.
One day, agents watched as a New Haven police cruiser pulled Midge over. Instead of arresting Midge for driving with a suspended license, the cop talked amicably with him for several minutes and left. The FBI tipped off the New Haven police; when confronted, the officer told his superiors he asked Midge about a job for a relative.
In February 1958, the FBI tracked Midge as he and Angela flew to Miami and then on to Havana. Midge had told people he was going to Cuba to visit Charlie the Blade Tourine, his old mentor who ran the Capri Hotel & Casino, a jewel in the crown of the mob’s Caribbean empire. Less than a year later when Castro marched into Havana, Tourine fled and would later operate mob casinos in the Bahamas and London. He would become one of the most powerful and respected members of the Genovese crime family.
Jail … Sort Of
In March, the state Supreme Court upheld Midge’s 340-day sentence for wrecking the Double Beach House nearly three years before. Instead of going to state prison, Midge again was allowed to serve his sentence at the Whalley Avenue jail in New Haven.
Within weeks, the FBI learned Midge was getting special privileges. Restaurants or his wife brought him all his food. An informant described a New Haven restaurant bringing Midge two three-pound lobsters with all the trimmings. He received visitors who were not searched, was allowed in off-limits areas of the jail and slept in the infirmary instead of a cell.
Agents visiting the jail on another matter saw two women bringing Midge food. That prompted the FBI to arrange a meeting with jail officials. When the agent arrived for the meeting, Midge was lounging at the entrance counter, an area off-limits to prisoners. The jail official explained that Midge “must have been waiting to get back into his cell block,” but admitted he couldn’t explain why Midge was there. The official nonetheless denied Midge was receiving special treatment.
Complaints to the FBI multiplied. Midge had bribed or intimidated all the guards, leaving him effectively in charge of the jail. He controlled all numbers and horse racing activity, smuggled contraband in and out and carried as much as $1,000 in cash in spite of jail rules limiting inmates to $5 each. He gave every inmate a few dollars upon their release. His goon squad beat up prisoners at will. He slugged the son of a high jail official and got away with it. He smuggled in liquor as well as prostitutes to service his friends, taking a cut of the hookers’ earnings. The guards let him leave the prison through a gap in the back fence. There were rumors that he had television and a phone in his cell, prompting the FBI to check the number and location of the jail’s phones. He continued to run the Operating Engineers from the jail; anyone who wanted a job had to come to the prison to meet him.
When he got out in early 1959, it was as if he’d never been in.
But the jail term did have consequences. Under increasing pressure from the FBI, the city’s two newspapers and the national AFL-CIO — its powerful, longtime president George Meany was believed to take a personal interest — the Operating Engineers fired Midge. He would continue to wield great power within the union, but he never again officially worked there. For the rest of his life, Midge lamented the loss of his union job.
Anthony
Midge was still devastated when he traveled to Florida in April 1960 to attend a convention of the Operating Engineers, of which he was no longer a member of the union. One night at the motel bar, he told the bartender that his son had just been killed an accident. He wept openly and unashamedly.
A few days later, Dade County police arrested Midge in the same lounge after he got drunk and started a fight.
Nemesis
At about 2 a.m. on April 23, 1960, about 30 men were gambling on the second floor of the Grand Avenue Social Club. Cards and money were strewn over tables. Suddenly, a window shattered, splattering glass against the shade blocking the view onto Grand Avenue. Shocked gamblers looked up to see a crowbar pull aside the shade and New Haven Detective Stephen Ahern standing in the bucket of a tree-trimming truck, a gun in his other hand. The men could hear wood splintering downstairs as police broke into the club. “This is the police!” Ahern bellowed. “Don’t touch the table!” Midge stood up, scooped some bills into his pockets and slowly walked toward the window. As he approached, he picked up a chair and reared back. “No Midge, don’t do it!” someone yelled. Midge didn’t listen and heaved the chair at Ahern. The detective ducked. The chair sailed over him and into the street below. Aside from minor cuts from flying glass, Ahern was uninjured. Midge and everyone else in the room were arrested. Ahern was only 30, but already a legend. Born in New Haven, he became a police officer in the early 1950s after serving in the Marine Corps. He eventually joined the city’s elite Special Service Division, created in response to the Mele murder nearly a decade before. It focused on gambling, vice and organized crime. Ahern became its star, especially renowned for his intelligence-gathering abilities. His sources were so good that he knew about crimes before they were committed. More than once, Ahern waited inside a building and arrested burglars as they broke in. The secret to Ahern’s success would not emerge for nearly two decades: He was wiretapping people. He started in the late 1950s by climbing telephone poles and clipping a phone company device to the wires to listen. He had a Yale student build him a primitive listening device and then moved on to ever-more sophisticated bugging equipment. Years later, a witness would tell a commission investigating the wiretapping about visiting Ahern’s Whalley Avenue apartment and hearing a “pen register” — a machine that records numbers dialed by a targeted phone — running in the next room. The witness told the commission that James Ahern, Steve’s younger brother and also a New Haven police officer, was in the apartment at the time. Both men paid little attention when the pen register — a noisy machine — went off. Steve and Jim had two other brothers on the force. Years later, it would seem as if the New Haven police were a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ahern family. Steve was relentless, dedicated and ruthless, and he hated the mafia. He is credited with being the first New Haven police officer to take the mob seriously and target it effectively. Midge and the mob had a nemesis.A Wake Up Call
Midge’s troubles grew. A month after Midge (pictured) chucked the chair at Steve Ahern, the FBI arrested him for accepting a $50 Christmas bonus and another $300 in questionable payments from a company building an I‑95 bridge. Hoover had urged the New Haven office to prosecute Midge for the payments from the start of its investigation in late 1957.
The case was weak. Even company officials told the FBI during the investigation that it was “making a mountain out of a molehill.” But the U.S. Attorney’s Office managed to win a conviction. It was an ironic moment: Midge had extorted vastly greater sums of money in ways that were more flagrantly illegal, not to mention all the men he’d beaten.
At his sentencing, the judge lectured Midge on his contempt for the law, saying he was unworthy of the Operating Engineers’ trust.
“His record demonstrates an almost continuous betrayal of trust over almost three decades,” U.S. District Court Judge William H. Timbers said. “The man has shown an utterly reckless disregard of the law and of law enforcement agencies of this state and this nation.”
Timbers imposed a one-year prison, saying it was “a wake up call” for the 40-year-old career criminal.
Midge’s lawyer, Howard Jacobs, filed every appeal, sought every delay, eventually asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case. When the court declined. Midge was ordered to report to the federal courthouse in downtown New Haven on Jan. 2, 1962, to begin his prison term.
He was an hour late. After turning himself in, Midge decided to go to lunch before beginning his journey to the federal prison in Milan, Michigan. With a U.S. marshal at his side, Midge exited the courthouse.
As he descended the courthouse steps, a New Haven Register photographer snapped a picture of a laughing Midge, without handcuffs and nattily dressed in a topcoat and hat. His ostensible guard is slightly behind him, smiling at the joke Midge apparently has just told.
Midge stopped smiling immediately after the shutter clicked. Enraged, he swore at the photographer and charged him. The photographer fled, with Midge on his heels. The guard made no effort to stop Midge or restrain him.
The photo made the front page of the paper.
Once at Milan, Midge flexed his political muscle. U.S. Rep. Robert Giaimo, who would represent the New Haven area in Congress until 1981, wrote the U.S. Bureau of Prisons asking it to transfer Midge to the Danbury federal prison so he could be closer to his family, according to the FBI. The bureau refused.
With Midge in prison, Whitey would have the city to himself. But Whitey was soon to have serious problems of his own.
Previous installments:
Chapter Two: Whitey
Chapter One: Midge’s Dynasty