Willie Moretti

Infobox Person
name=Guarino Moretti

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thumb
caption=Willie Moretti during one of his outbursts at members of the Kefauver Committee.
birth_date=1894
birth_place=Bari, Puglia, Italy
death_date=death date|1951|10|4|mf=y
death_place=Fort Lee, New Jersey, U.S.

Guarino "Willie" Moretti (1894 - October 4, 1951) was an underboss of the Genovese crime family and a cousin of family boss Frank Costello.

Early life

Born "Guarino Moretti" in Bari, Puglia, Italy in 1894, Moretti came to America in the early 1930s to join his family in New Jersey.

From 1933 to 1951, Willie Moretti, During the 1940s, Moretti, in association with Joe Adonis, Settimo Accardi and Abner Zwillman, ran lucrative gambling dens in New Jersey and Upstate New York from his Monmouth County, New Jersey, home.

In 1950, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Organized Crime started an investigation known as the Kefauver hearings. Along with other members of Genovese family, Moretti was called to testify. Moretti was the only one who cooperated with the committee. While other mobsters were repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution and refusing to speak, Moretti told jokes, talked candidly, and generally played it up for the cameras. In doing so, he was violating the Mafia code of silence, known as omertà.

Hollywood connections

In the 1940s, Morretti became friends with singer Frank Sinatra. Sinatra's first wife, Nancy Barbato, was a paternal cousin of John "Johnny Sausages" Barbato, a veteran sidewalk soldier for Moretti. In 1948, Sinatra sang at the wedding of John Barbato's daughter. According to testimony from Moretti, he helped Sinatra arrange performances in return for kick-backs. It was also rumored that Moretti persuaded band leader Tommy Dorsey to release Sinatra from his contract by threatening to kill him. This incident inspired the similar incident in "The Godfather" [http://www.carpenoctem.tv/mafia/sinatra.html]

In September 1951, Moretti become acquainted with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. The two comedians were performing at Ben Marden's Riviera nightclub in Fort Lee, New Jersey; at that time, Moretti and Longy Zwillman were watching the club's cardroom for Marden. On a later occasion, Martin and Lewis did a command performance at the wedding of Moretti's daughter.

Final lunch

As Moretti's mental deterioration worsened, possibly resulting from syphilis, [citeweb
title=A Man of Honor: The Autobiography of Joseph Bonanno
author= Joe Bananno with Sergio Lalli
date=1983
publisher=St Martin's Paperbacks
ISBN=0-312-97923-1
page=172] it was decided to kill him. On October 4, 1951, three of Anastasia's hitmen took Morretti to lunch (at Dukes Restaurant which was located at 457 Palisade Ave., Cliffside Park, N.J.) They shot him repeatedly in the chest, killing him. He was 57 years old. (Dukes in Cliffside Park, N.J. was a central meeting place for the crime family bosses.) On the day of his murder, Martin and Lewis had a lunch date scheduled with Morretti. However, earlier that morning, Lewis learned that he had contracted the mumps and both men totally forgot about lunch. Later, while trying to reach Moretti to apologize and explain, they learned he was dead from the television news (Lewis 2005).

In popular culture

In "A Man of Honor: The Autobiography of Joseph Bonanno", Simon & Schuster , ISBN 0-671-46747-6, Joseph Bonanno referred to Willie Moretti as Frank Costello's "strength". This would later be compared to the relationship between Mario Puzo's character "Luca Brasi" and "Don Vito Corleone's" so-called "strength" in the novel "The Godfather". [http://gangstersinc.tripod.com/ShoMar0706.html]

References

*Lewis, Jerry and James Kaplan. "Dean & Me (A Love Story)". New York: Doubleday, 2005. ISBN 0-7679-2086-4

Further reading

*Reid, Ed and Demaris, Ovid. "The Green Felt Jungle". Montreal: Pocket Books, 1964. 241 pages.
*Bonanno, Joseph. "In A Man of Honor: The Autobiography of Joseph Bonanno", Simon & Schuster, 1984. ISBN 0-671-46747-6

External links

* [http://www.americanmafia.com/Feature_Articles_183.html New York Stories - Part I] by John William Tuohy
* [http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,859067,00.html TIME Magazine Archive Article - Willing Willie - December 25, 1950]
* [http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,814455,00.html TIME Magazine Archive Article - Willie's Million - February 26, 1951]
* [http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=6105 Guarino "Willie" Moretti] at [http://www.findagrave.com FindAGrave.com]