After the Two Tonys were shot dead and left slumped in their car in Hollywood, the LAPD prepared an internal report titled "GANGLAND KILLINGS, Los Angeles Area, 1900-1951."
The survey went back to when fruit peddlers fought over turf and the Black Hand shook them down for a cut of the action. Police were certain who committed the first gangland killing, in 1906, but "strong man" Joe Ardizzone was acquitted when "no witnesses . . . would talk." Ardizzone later made the list in a different capacity -- as a victim -- when he vanished in 1931 after leaving his Sunland vineyard to meet a cousin from Italy. No one was convicted in that case, either.
Even as the causes of underworld squabbles evolved over the decades -- from fruit carts to Prohibition liquor sales to control of illegal gambling -- there was one constant: how easy it was to get away with murder.
The "GANGLAND KILLINGS" report listed 57 over the first half of the 20th century. And one conviction. One. For the 1937 rub-out of Redondo Beach "gambling czar" Les Bruneman. And that case eventually unraveled.
What that left was half a century of gangland killings whose case summaries ended with "No prosecution" or the more optimistic "No prosecution to date." Time and again, there was no overcoming the underworld's code of silence, "omerta."
So it was with the Aug. 6, 1951, slaughter of the Two Tonys, a pair of losers from Kansas City who had raised the ire of the mob hierarchy by robbing the cash room at Las Vegas' Flamingo Hotel. "Wild-haired young bloods," Mickey Cohen called them.
Anthony Brancato and Anthony Trombino had been spotted meeting in L.A. with another Kansas City import, Jimmy "the Weasel" Fratianno. Hours later, Trombino was about to light a cigar in the front seat of his Oldsmobile, with Brancato beside him, when someone in the back blew their brains out, just off Hollywood Boulevard.
Jimmy the Weasel had an alibi, of course -- he'd spent the evening in Burbank, at a fish fry at the Five O'Clock Club owned by Nicola "Nick" Licata. After Licata and 12 others dutifully backed Fratianno's story, the cops tried to get a clerk at Schwab's drugstore to say that a stogie found at the murder scene was a brand that Jimmy the Weasel favored, but she said no, that was too cheap. He was a 70-cent-cigar man.
Thus did the double killing become another "No prosecution to date."
What you had to do, in Jack O'Mara's job, was settle for whatever small victories you could manufacture.
