Chapter 4
The Fratellos and the Mafia
The Des Moines police knew Frankie “The Geek” Fratello was connected directly to Al Capone’s Chicago operation in the 1920s before Scarface went down on a career-ending tax evasion charge in 1931. How could they not? In 1930, when Capone showed up in Des Moines, he delivered Fratello personally in a new Cadillac after he was released from the Illinois State Prison in Joliet. It was front-page news in The Tribune. The Geek did a few years’ stretch in the joint for running a stolen car racket out of Chicago’s north side. According to prison records, Francis Fratello came from Italy through Ellis Island in New York like most Italian mobsters. Exactly how Frankie “The Geek” Fratello was connected to the mob was not understood. The following year, Capone went to trial and was convicted on the tax evasion charges. He eventually wound up imprisoned on Alcatraz until he was released in 1939 on hospice considerations to his home in Florida. The word in the press was prison doctors on Alcatraz determined his mental faculties had been reduced to the level of a banjo-strumming retard from the late-stage effects of syphilis. Half of America believed the story was fake, and Capone had worked out a deal with the government. Capone, however, was never seen again in public or the news. The evolving wars in Europe and Asia eclipsed the public’s interest in Capone and his old Chicago Outfit. In almost silence, Frank “The Geek” Fratello parlayed the benefits of this early relationship into a prosperous business on the other side of Walnut Creek and the Raccoon River.
Frank Fratello’s entire life was not understood because there was no one to tell it. He developed a terrible stuttering pattern as a young child that rendered him shy and socially awkward. He never knew his father or Italy. His mother told him his father was killed in Africa shortly after he was born in the Great War with the negroes. They were from Anzio, a beach town near Rome. His mother spoke only a few words in English when they emigrated to America aboard a ship out of Genoa. One of his first memories was remembering her attempting to enroll him in public school in Brooklyn. She was advised through a translator that he would be better suited for a mental institution as they were equipped to work with disabled children. Instead, she found hope in the Catholic Church, which organized their own elementary school classes in English for Italian immigrant children in the Brooklyn area. The nuns would not take him into their classes past the second grade as he was academically falling far behind his peers and became the object of ridicule. The nuns, however, confirmed that he was not retarded at all. He understood several spoken Italian words and a few English words as well. He could count to ten on his fingers in his first year.
At home, his mother provided additional support by attempting to learn English herself through phrase books and children’s books she loaned from the library. What education little Francis did receive was more in Italian than English in the very beginning. She would verbalize a letter in the alphabet and point at them. She would then say the letter and he would draw it. Eventually, they moved on to words. She taught him math from an abacus the library also had available to loan and by counting money out when buying items from retail vendors on the street. He moved on to comics and the box scores of baseball and football games. The inability to speak made it difficult to make friends, unfortunately. No one, including his mother, understood why he could not speak when he could demonstrate that he could read and write proficiently.
In his early teenage years, he started hanging out in the streets of his neighborhood. Al Capone was already a delinquent teenager in Brooklyn himself and a known bully on the streets. They met in the juvenile detention cell in a Brooklyn precinct. Frank was fascinated with automobiles in books and movies before he ever stole a car. It was the city refusing to give Frank a driver’s license, on account of his speech disability, that drove him to steal his first at 16. After crashing the first car he had stolen, he stole a second one, not knowing it belonged to a New York City police captain. The car was later found with Frank sleeping in the back. He was hauled off to juvenile detention until he could be positively identified. It was here he met the teenage Capone, who had been arrested on a burglary charge. It was like Capone said in the cell, “I ain’t never met a mute. He is as weird as the geeks at the circus. It ain’t like he is retarded either. When he tries to talk, I lose it. It is goddamn funny. It is like the fat lady, wolf man, or the midget on the midway.” Frank didn’t know the geeks were the ones at the circus who bit the heads off of live snakes and chickens. It was a cruel, but accurate, street-level definition of Frank’s condition. What Capone also knew was a man that can’t speak can keep a secret better than anyone. When Capone slapped another guy trying to shake down Frank in the juvenile detention cell, a young Frank was grateful. He convinced a guard to give him a pencil and a piece of paper. Frank identified himself to the guard and explained what happened in the cell. The rogue teen was extricated from the cell, and Frank handed Capone a piece of paper that read, “Hey, thanks for sticking up for me. I owe you one. I don’t know who that guy was.” Capone was stunned Frank was literate. Most of the youths on the street were not. The juveniles with parents were released the following day after they were documented and released to their parents. The others were processed for an orphanage if they were young or a boys’ home if they were teenagers.
Frank got Capone’s address and began to hang out with Capone and his gang of young hoodlums to his mother dismay. Capone was already stealing cars, starting fights with other teenage hoodlums, and breaking into businesses at night when Frank joined him. Frank, like most, thought the scars on Capone’s face were intimidating. It gave him street credibility. He could survive a knife fight to the face. Any challengers would need to come stronger than that. Capone worked his way up among various local gangs, and Frank “The Geek” Fratello followed him around. Capone’s propensity for violence and The Geek’s ability to hot-wire cars were impressive skills respected on the street. Frank loved driving and working on the cars he stole. He began learning from mechanics and other guys hanging around gas stations how to work on them. It was Capone who had the idea of reselling the cars on the other side of town to unwitting buyers. Frank soon grew a reputation as a solid partner and wheelman driving the getaway car from various robberies orchestrated by Capone. A few years later, Frank and his mother ended up following Capone to Chicago. They lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a brick building on the northwest side of Chicago in a town called Barrington. Capone got The Geek’s mother a job working in the kitchen of a local Italian restaurant during the day. The arraignment worked out well in the beginning. The name The Geek stuck, and other mobsters didn’t care why the Italian kid from New York couldn’t speak. He was Capone’s driver and carried a pistol around Chicago; that was enough.
Frank had his first sexual encounter in the back of a Ford with one of the women in the Chicago outfit’s orbit named Charlotte. Her husband and her father were both killed by Chicago mob violence since the Volstead Act became law. She was fond of Frank but refused to marry a man that couldn’t talk and told Capone so. Capone thought it was odd she fucked him in the first place. She then became pregnant and gave birth to a son, Anthony. She became despondent and turned to the bottle. She could not take care of the child and the boy, and Frank was given custody of little Anthony. Frank watched and played with him during the days, and his mother took care of the boy during the evenings while he hooked up with Capone’s outfit to carry out capers throughout Chicago land. Charlotte eventually quit coming around and disappeared altogether.
Eventually, The Geek got busted behind the wheel of a stolen car after the gang carried out a bank robbery. Capone and two other gunmen were dropped off in an alley and escaped moments before the police apprehended The Geek. The prosecutor was hoping to connect the stuttering defendant in the bank robbery to Chicago’s Italian organized crime syndicate, but he refused to cooperate. The judge considered him a bit player. The Geek was never going to move up in the mob because he couldn’t speak. He could not give anyone an order.He couldn’t talk on the phone. The judge assumed he was likely an orphan who had been taken advantage of years ago because of his disability. Without the ability to speak and being a father, his life would be difficult, and his options in the world would be limited. Unfortunately, for Frank, the gunmen killed an employee at the bank during the heist. Capone was an evil son of a bitch and a blight on the city of Chicago. In the end, The Geek was all the prosecutor had. The judge knew Frank knew more than he was leading on and sentenced him to five years anyways. When Frank’s mother became ill and died, Capone assumed custody of the child instead of having him turned over to an orphanage. Capone had Anthony taken care of by various maids, nannies, tutors, and staff the entire time The Geek sat in jail. The car ride from Joliet to Des Moines with Al Capone was the first time a ten-year-old Anthony Fratello met his father.
Shortly after The Geek’s release in 1929, from Joliet, Capone was spotted by a Tribune reporter on the south side of Des Moines at Fratello’s new Windy City Pizza. He was sharing a pizza and beer with Fratello. The place was not even open to the public yet. Capone obviously put up the money for the pizza place in Des Moines. Immediately, Windy City Pizza seemed an obvious place to stake out for the Des Moines cops. Fratello was the perfect stooge to run the place, but it would be impossible to catch him saying anything. He had just gotten out of prison and would not have the money for the operation nor the credit to get a loan from the bank. But his name was indeed on the title of the loan. It was approved out of a Chicago bank that somehow miraculously had underwritten the loan while Fratello, the mute, was still sitting in a cell in Joliet.
The truth was Capone wanted an outlet outside of Chicago for dozens of stolen cars piling up in a warehouse in Chicago. Everyone was making money in the 1920s, and cars were rolling off the production lines. The stock market shot up, and prohibition created the speak easies serving bootleg liquor over the entire city if you knew the password at the door. Capone had a crew that was holding up the lot attendants at night, tying them up, and then stealing a dozen cars at a time. The cars were stored in a warehouse on the west side of Chicago until they could be unloaded. The operation was a success until the market crashed and suddenly no one could afford a car. Capone’s idea was to start out-of-state used car dealerships with the stolen cars. That would not only allow the cars a place to sit outside of Chicago until they could be arranged to be sold, it would also be a genuine piece of the pie for The Geek’s silence. Capone would have fake bills of sales and receipts created, allowing the cars to be registered out of state. The Geek could work on them one by one on a used car lot year-round when not making pizzas.
Missing out on the photo op with the new Cadillac was Spaghetti Mafretti himself in the kitchen. He was brought from Chicago to teach The Geek how to make authentic Italian Neapolitan pizza. Mafretti was a legitimate pizza maker and businessman. Mafretti’s Pizzeria was the single best Neapolitan pizza in Chicago. The tentacles of Capone’s operation spread the same tomatoes, flour, olive oil, and bootleg Chianti by the cask across the city. Mafretti showed the other owners how to prepare the pizza to the level of an art form. A significant portion of pizzas eaten in Chicago were linked to Spaghetti Mafretti and Capone’s outfit without the customers even knowing it. Spaghetti, like The Geek, was not a made man in Capone’s Chicago outfit, even though they were both Italian. They were important tertiary players that enjoyed many perks through association but not the ridiculous money that flowed to the mobsters higher up and ultimately Capone. Spaghetti was responsible for supplying the Italian restaurants and pizzerias across Chicago with Italian extra virgin olive oil, not Spanish. San Marzano tomatoes were required for the best pizza, not the local American ones. Semolina and Durham flour were mandatory for the perfect dough. These all came straight off the boat arriving at port in Lake Michigan monthly from Italy. Inside the shipments were cocaine from South America and opium from Persia. The restaurants and pizzerias themselves were fronts to clean the money generated from the illicit drug sales.
In Iowa, a couple of heated garage bays and The Geek, or a hired mechanic, could tinker on the cars all year long. He could sell them to locals with a new, but fake, title once the miles were rolled back and any links to previous ownership were scrubbed. The cars usually had their odometers rolled back to half of what the actual registered mileage was. Others were completely stripped down and sold as parts through advertisements in the Tribune. The remaining chassis were sold to the scrap yard. This arrangement started with thirty stolen cars being driven one at a time to a south side lot purchased a few blocks from the original Windy City Pizza location.
The guy driving the cars and taking the bus back to Chicago was named Marvin Meeno. He was a mid-level member of one of the crews that helped steal the cars. He was more of a smooth talker, who liked nice clothes, women, cocaine, and gin more than being a parent or a citizen. He had a young son, Mickey, growing up without a mother. The Geek suspected she ran out on him. Since The Geek had a young son too, Capone asked if he could take in Meeno’s young boy while his dad drove the cars from Chicago to Des Moines. The Geek agreed, and all the parts were now in place. Capone was at the height of his power and influence, and the favor for The Geek was trivial in his larger scheme.
Capone thought The Geek might be able to build a crew in Des Moines with Meeno as a captain working under him. Meeno could be the voice of the operation. The original idea was once the lot was full of cars, Meeno would start selling the cars and The Geek would focus on the pizzeria with his son. An outfit set up in Des Moines would be the perfect place to start the new business model. Iowa was close enough a car could be driven in there in a single day and Meeno would be back in Chicago the next day to repeat the process. Once Des Moines was flourishing, the model would be replicated throughout the Midwest. Capone already had all the men and muscle money could buy. The Wall Street crowd might have been worried when the stock market crashed, but Capone had connections to unlimited amounts of bootleg liquor and drugs coming in off the piers on Lake Michigan, which he controlled.
The Des Moines and fledgling Valley Junction police departments’ concerns subsided a few months later in 1930 when Capone was arrested and subsequently convicted of tax evasion. Spaghetti Mafretti threw all his books in the pizza oven and fled with all the cash he had saved up back to Italy on one of the ships moored on Lake Michigan. Capone placed his childhood friend and fellow mobster, Frank Nitti, in charge of the operation while he served his decade-long sentence. Once in charge, Nitti could have cared less about Iowa. Nitti felt Iowa was too rural. It was a great place to hide from the law during the Prohibition days, but there was easier money made hustling in Chicago. The Geek in Des Moines vanished from the books and no longer paid his tributes to their outfit. He got the car lot and Windy City Pizza free and clear.
Prohibition ended at the close of 1933. Slowly but surely over the next few years, Capone’s former empire began to dwindle while he sat in a cell in California on Alcatraz Island, deteriorating from late-stage syphilis. When Capone was eventually let out early in 1939, he was bat-shit crazy from syphilis and never mentioned a word about Des Moines. Eventually, Frank Fratello’s probation expired without a violation. He was in the clear to build up his own operation in his neighborhood on the south side of Des Moines.
The Geek read in the Tribune in 1943 that the Chicago organization once started by Capone was raided by the feds. Nitti discovered he and several other associates were going to do years behind bars for attempting to extort several Hollywood movie producers. He shot himself on the train tracks outside of Chicago. When Meeno never returned after dropping off over twenty cars, The Geek had a feeling Meeno was not coming back either. He was either a deadbeat dad leaving his own son behind or killed. The Geek suspected Capone or someone connected to him would reach out, but they never did. He said nothing, and nothing was ever said to him until the news of Capone’s arrest played out in the headlines.
Meeno’s boy, Mickey, and Anthony got along like brothers growing up with both being new to Des Moines. The Geek made both of them promise not to talk about Uncle Al, as he called him. With the help of the Catholic Church in Des Moines, both boys were enrolled in the Des Moines public school system and began elementary school on the south side of Des Moines. The Geek was proud of the two boys, and they meant the world to him.
Windy City Pizza made the best pizza in Des Moines and had the first pinball games in a pizzeria in Iowa. The pizza was not only delicious but filling and relatively inexpensive for customers. The thin slices of pizza were an art form that folded over in your hands with the mouthwatering garlic and oregano in the San Marzano tomato sauce. The pizza was crunchy and topped with stringy, melted mozzarella cheese and fresh basil. It was unbeatable. The profit margins on the pizza were almost $5 for every one invested. Spaghetti, lasagna, and an Alfredo sauce were added to the menu shortly after. The pasta, like the pizza, was inexpensive and made fresh. It was a popular alternative to the pizza. The Italians during Prohibition were allowed to make their own wine without a lot of hassle from the Des Moines police. Unfortunately, the sweet wine at the time was made from Concord grapes, which were better suited for jams and jellies than wine. After Prohibition was lifted in 1933, The Geek was getting cases of bottled Chianti directly from Italy on a monthly basis until the war broke out.
The pizzeria also had a couple of pinball machines installed. The coin-operated machines were popular throughout New York City and Chicago. The player would pull the plunger, and the ball would shoot out onto the tilted table and allow gravity to wind the metal ball back down towards the player, potentially falling through holes on the playing surface that earned the player either money or nothing. They were common scams, and various police departments began cracking down on some of the fraudsters. Many had their coin counters disconnected or magnets placed under the surface to pull the ball down into holes that had no rewards. The nickels added up and were funneled into fake disabled veteran donation jars on every counter. Those were emptied and converted to cash weekly. Eventually, the Italian American Society of Des Moines was used to host pizza and pinball tournaments on their premises. It all seemed innocent on the surface.
The Tribune and other newspapers across the country had also recently been following the story of the government’s admission to working with Italian mobster Lucky Luciano during the war. The fear was that German and Italian spies would try to access the piers in New York City and begin sabotaging infrastructure. The Italian immigrant population notoriously remained tight-lipped and might even contain some Italian loyalists in key positions on the waterfront. When the SS Normandie was set ablaze and sank in her berth in New York Harbor a few months after Pearl Harbor was attacked, intelligence assets from the Navy reached out to Luciano while he was behind bars serving a decades-long prison sentence. An agreement was made to transfer Luciano to a less restricted prison and offer him clemency for his crimes if the longshoremen would not strike and provide what assistance they could. Desperate times required desperate measures, and Hitler was the devil himself. It was a common-sense agreement when it was initially made. There had been no strikes so far. However, times had indeed changed. Hitler and the Germans were retreating. Mussolini was dead, and Italy was in American hands. The war in Europe was close to over. The other Italian organized crime families in New York saw opportunity through the impending upheaval. The war would end sooner or later, but the city still remained dependent on them to keep an open and functioning harbor.
The unintended consequences of the government’s deal with Luciano and the longshoremen were that it emboldened every Italian hoodlum associate across America to believe they too were above the law. With enough money, muscle, and political influence, there was potential immunity from prosecution. The Geek was not immune to the thought of stretching his wings. He was confident the authorities were not 100% certain he was not still affiliated with the remaining members of the Chicago mafia. It was a street credibility that did not exist. His presence the previous week on 5th Street in Valley Junction was simply reconnaissance. The plausible deniability was that everyone loved pizza and pinball. He was a businessman. The obvious place in town to get some action going on the streets would be in the old Valley Junction neighborhood of West Des Moines.
The truth was Frank Fratello wasn’t sure when to pull the trigger on expanding. He wanted Anthony to come home first. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do after the war. He just wanted him home like all parents with a son in the war. The battles of 1944 across the globe turned the war in the Allies’ favor. The fighting in the South Pacific and the Eastern Front killed millions in Asia and Eastern Europe, but one day it too would end. The Imperial Japanese Army and the Nazis were ideologues and fought to the death at every encounter. That made it difficult to assume there would be any abrupt end to the fighting. It had been months since he heard from Anthony through postcards. There was a brief call from a phone booth in San Diego before he boarded a ship to San Francisco. Mickey translated over the phone while the old man was frantically scribbling on a notepad beside him. It made him so happy to learn via Mickey that Anthony completed his language training. His own son now spoke Italian. He couldn’t wait to see him after the war and hear him speak their mother tongue like a native.
For Anthony Fratello, Des Moines and that day on the phone were a long way from the train station in Monterrey, California. He was twenty-four years old, a newly commissioned Navy lieutenant in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and still a virgin. He sighed, hung up the phone, and the next sailor in line stepped up to call home. He had completed his language training up the coast in Monterrey and was expecting to be flown back to Virginia and shipped out further on to Italy. That was almost three years ago. Instead, the Navy had a different future planned for him and several of his OSS classmates.
The students were initially selected based on high academic marks on the Generalized Aptitude Test that all enlistees and officers were required to take prior to entry. Tony was a good student and athlete. His favorite subjects at Lincoln High School in Des Moines were history and music. His real desire was to play football professionally, and he convinced Iowa Hawkeyes football coach, Eddie Anderson, in 1940 to let him try out his freshman year. It was the year after Nile Kinnick won the Heisman Trophy, and the Hawkeyes finished ranked in the top ten teams in the nation the previous year. He made the practice squad in 1940 but was not allowed any minutes during games. Kinnick had graduated, and it showed on the field. The Hawkeyes won their first two games, then lost four in a row. Once they were eliminated from any future post-season play, coach Anderson gave a few freshmen some minutes. Tony Fratello, #87, was allowed to play on special teams in two games. They won both. This earned him a starting spot as a sophomore receiver on the 1941 team. He scored two touchdowns and gained 142 yards that season in receiving yards in a losing season. Two months later, the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941.
One year later, the college campuses across America saw enrollment plummet with men entering the war. President Roosevelt declared the college campuses and universities across America to become a training corps for the Army and Navy instead of shutting them down for the duration of the war. Being a football player for the Hawkeyes was a bonus for #87 in 1943. The government was looking for intelligent athletes to join an American special forces unit being built similar to the program created by the British. Tony’s passing grade in the introduction to law course at the University of Iowa was sufficient to select him for the specialized V-12 program officer training program if he selected the Navy or the Army’s Specialized Training Program if he opted for the latter. Kinnick went into the Navy to become a pilot, and Tony figured he would do the same. He completed his first semester of 1942 in Iowa City and then transferred to Iowa State University in Ames that summer. After initial testing, he was not an academic standout among his peers, but his last name’s Italian ethnicity, and the fact that he knew a few Italian words already, placed him in the foreign language line of training. The other students were either placed on paths to study medicine or engineering. One year later, his college education was completed through the accelerated courses. He was then sent to Notre Dame University in Indiana for the Navy’s V-7 accelerated Reserve Midshipman School for eight months. Upon completion, students received a commission in the Navy.
The young OSS officers were assigned to various units based on the needs of the government, their previous experience, and luck. Ensign Fratello was unlucky, or not, depending on how one looked at it. Tony was expecting survival training in the jungle would be his next evolution, but he was mistaken. The orders he received upon completion of his training amounted to a desk jockey, as the other OSS classmates referred to the position. His orders were to report to a Navy public affairs command at an obscure shipyard he had never heard of near San Francisco, Mare Island. The good news was the job came with a promotion to lieutenant junior grade and the odds of him getting wounded or killed in action were slim. The bad news was the odds of him being deemed a war hero, like several of his classmates were destined to be, were equally as slim.
Mussolini’s regime in Italy collapsed in the summer of 1943 while hundreds of students were in the lengthy training pipelines. After his own fascist party voted him out in a final vote of no confidence, Italy’s King Vittorio Emanuele had him arrested. Italian partisans were now fighting alongside the Allies in Italy against the retreating Nazis. It was now January of 1945, and the OSS didn’t need more Italian speakers on the ground in Italy. Instead, he was assigned to the public affairs slot to help the government control the narrative on the war.