Bug and Meyer Mob: Early Lansky-Siegel gang In the 1970s when Meyer Lansky was in Israel and trying to win permanent residence there, he was questioned about the early Bug and Meyer Mob. He insisted, in an effort to win the sympathy of Israelis, that it was just a little old group of Jewish boys out to protect other Jewish boys from the dirty Irish gangs of the era who were beating up on them. Actually the last thing Bug and Meyer were concerned with was acting as selfless pogrom fighters.
The gang, formed in 1921 by Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, was aptly named the Bug and Meyer Mob. Lansky was the brains and Siegel the star shooter of an expert group of gunmen. They started as a gun-for-hire gang that also supplied mobsters with stolen cars and trucks and expert drivers. Their specialty, however, was as shootists; they performed as hit men on order. Lansky hired out his boys to protect bootleg gangs' convoys and at times helped out in hijacking rival gangs' trucks. It was not always wise to involve Bug and Meyer in hijacking because they might just as readily turn around and grab your own shipments.
The mob's rates came very high under the circumstances, and it was hardly surprising that some bootleggers finally figured out it would be cheaper to bring them into the operation and give them a slice of the take rather than pay them wages.
Lucky Luciano had known both Lansky and Siegel from their teenage years (Siegel at the time the Bug and Meyer mob was formed was a murderously precocious l5-year-old) and was the prime mover in having the Jewish gangster duo join Joe Adonis's Broadway Mob, Manhattan's foremost bootleg outfit. It was Lansky's first regular work with leading Italian mobsters, an arrangement that would continue the whole of his life.
When Lansky and Luciano formed the national crime syndicate in the early 1930s, it was Lansky who pushed hardest for a special outfit to handle "enforcement,'' that is, murders for the entire syndicate. In that sense the old Bug and Meyer mob served as the model for Murder, Inc., and in fact many of its "graduates" played godfatherly advisers for the Brooklyn extermination troop bossed by Louis Lepke and Albert Anastasia.
See also: Lansky, Meyer; Siegel, Benjamin "Bugsy."
Bullet Eaters: Hard-to-kill victims "Bullet eaters" are legends of the mob, victims or wise guys who manage to survive being shot several times on one or more occasions. An amazing bullet eater was gangster Legs Diamond who was shot on numerous occasions by underworld gunners and lived. Once he was peppered in the head with shot and took a bullet in the foot but still escaped. Another time his wounds were so bad that doctors predicted his death. They were wrong. Diamond was finally dispatched by killers who found him asleep in bed, and, while one held his head, the other pumped three shots into it. That was more than even Legs Diamond could digest.
The most storied bullet eater of all has to have been the now incarcerated Carmine "the Snake" Persico, who during the mob wars for control of the Colombo crime family, won tribute as a man who could catch bullets with his teeth. That was a slight exaggeration. In fact, Snake was ambushed in a car, and bullets rained in on him, through the doors, the frame, the windows, and the motor. One spent bullet lodged in Persico's mouth and teeth. That was good enough for the boys. The Snake could catch bullets with his teeth—real bullet eating!
Burial Grounds of the Mafia In August 1985 a tranquil Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, neighborhood, centering around a Mobil station at 86th Street and Bay 7th Street, was shattered by sudden and intensive excavation work. Under the eyes of FBI agents three backhoe units dug a gaping 10-foot-deep hole. At first, journalists got no comment on the reason for the excavation; eventually it came out that the FBI expected to find at least three mob rubout victims buried beneath the gasoline tanks.
One of the owners of the station recalled that the FBI "come up to me a week ago and say, 'We got to dig up your station.' I say, 'Why?' But the FBI guy says, 'No particular reason.' We take it in stride. They think somebody's going to find some bodies. There's nothing there we know of."
The owners, who had bought the station eight years previously, made an agreement with the FBI that the two massive gas tanks pulled out for the dig would be replaced, the station would be fully restored and compensation would be given for lost business.
An FBI spokesman said it had decided to dig up the station after getting information from two different sources that it was a mob burial ground. The final count: zero bodies. The backhoes started filling up the hole, and the full restoration effort ran to about three weeks.
The hunt for Mafia burial grounds has always tantalized law enforcement officials because it is an established fact that mobsters do seem to form a sentimental attachment to certain spots. The father-and-son Mafia team of Charles and Joe Dippolito, both soldiers in the Los Angeles crime family, planted a great many corpses, each with a sack of lime, in the fertile soil of their vineyard in Cucamonga.
