J. Edgar Hoover's Top 10 "Hoodlum" List

Welcome back to Milwaukee Mafia. I’m Eric Wulterkens. I’m Gavin Schmitt. We are back with one of your many episodes and we are going to be doing another question that a listener has submitted.

We will start with this question which is – What kind of people were on the Top 10 Hoodlum List? Were they charged with crimes more often?

The first thing I think you should do with this Gavin is explain what the Top 10 Hoodlum List is. Because I don’t remember this ever being on a podcast. My guest is this came up during the Reno Heist because the guy who was involved with that made it onto this list so I may have mentioned it at that time.

What happened is in: 1957

A guy with the State Patrol caught wind of this and thought it was very suspicious. A lot of fancy cars, a lot of guys in suits. This is very out of the normal situation for the area so he sets up a road block and a lot of these guys get stopped on the way out. A number of them don’t get caught because they run through the woods. But the guys who do get stopped he does run their record and these guys are all notorious in one way or another. He figured out real fast that he was on to something.

This makes huge, huge headlines and up until this point the FBI had not really been investigating organized crime. There are a few exceptions here or there where they would look into things but as a whole it wasn’t a focus.

So, the Bureau of Narcotics which is now the DEA had been looking into this for years but the FBI had not. J Edgar Hoover, the Head of the FBI is like “Oh crap, we have to get on this”. And up until this point he didn’t really care. His excuse was that this is a local issue so it’s not our problem. There’s some debate about on his opinions on that. Whatever the case was they really hadn’t focused on it. But now he was caught in a situation where he was kind of embarrassed because people were asking the FBI “Hey what’s up with this” and they don’t know because they don’t have these records.

A memo goes out to all the offices across the bureau offices across the country and it says – Create a list of the top 10 hoodlums in your area and hoodlums was the common word they used at the time and in this case they specifically meant mob members.

This memo went out to all the different offices and they compiled a list. And it’s kind of funny because New York makes a list, New Jersey makes a list, Chicago makes a list. But then it gets a little weird. Other cities like San Jose, California has an office so they have to make a list. And they find some guys to put on it but their list is clearly not like the New York list.

You read the New York list and you think these guys are some bad mfers. And the San Jose list is – these guys are kind of a nuisance. So there is a big variation there. There was a FBI office in Montana and I don’t know if they even made a list.

Milwaukee of course makes a list and they come up with ten guys and some of them totally make sense.

of the game because this was: 1957

The actual mob boss in Milwaukee, John Alioto, is on the list. Walter Brocca who was like the handyman. He goes around and does construction for the mob. Somehow he gets on the list. And they picked a handful of guys, one from Kenosha, one from Racine just to round it out. But the list as a whole some of them made sense but on others they were reaching. But again to be fair in 1957 they did not know yet. This was before they even started investigating. So the fact that they came up with a list at all, I will give them credit for that.

So, yes that is where this list came about and then to investigate the mob they would hit this hard. They would pick ten guys and look into everything about them. Employment records, school transcripts, they would look up marriage records, birth records, they would look into their parents, I mean just excessive amounts of information they compiled on these ten guys.

And I should be clear, nine of the ten were Italian. The tenth guy was actually Jewish and he ran a Pawn Shop. So they considered him to be the fence of the group.

You know what a fence is? A fence is usually a Pawn Shop owner but it doesn’t have to be, but it is somebody who takes in stolen goods and then sells them for them. He is the fence because he divides the criminal world and the legitimate world. Because if I steal something and then I go and list it on craigslist that’s stupid of me because whoever is looking for this item is going to be like “Oh, here’s my item and now I know who stole it” So instead you give it to this other guy and he finds a way to sell it for you. And he is not going to be putting it on craigslist because then he is going to get caught. But he will find a way to sell it to a third party in another city where it is far enough that no one is going to be looking for it. That’s what a fence is. He helps you get rid of stolen goods.

You rarely, rarely see the word mafia in a FBI document. They would call them the Top Hoodlums and apparently everyone at that time knew what that meant because all these different office throughout the country picked up the mob guys. So someone understood that hoodlum meant mob guys. On occasion the word mafia would come up for the mob if they were interviewing someone. They would write it down then because they were quoting a guy but instead of using the word mafia the FBI just decides to invent a whole new term for it and so they called it La Costra Nostra.

This is a sidetrack but the first big informant they got was a guy in New York named Joe Valachi and I may be saying his name wrong but either way they get this guy and he says the organization is called Costra Nostra . That’s what he tells them. I don’t know where he got this from because no one seems to agree that this is the case but it is a very poor Italian translation of “this thing of ours”. So if they were talking instead of saying they were in the mafia they would say “Hey you know about this thing of ours” so they would refer to it as Costra Nostra but that was never the name of the organization but the FBI picked up on that and they called it Costra Nostra but even further they called it La Costra Nostra so it is The this thing of ours. Which makes absolutely no sense. They clearly did not understand Italian.

From the: 1950

The guys that got caught in New York got charged with Conspiracy and this went through the courts for quite awhile and eventually ended getting tossed out because no one could tell what the conspiracy was. It was a group of guys with criminal records that associated together but they weren’t doing anything. The only thing they could prove was that they were grilling out steaks so it ended up getting tossed eventually.

Was this an embarrassment to the FBI? Yes it was. There were previous national meetings in Atlantic City, there was one in Cleveland at one point but none of them got the publicity that this thing got. I mean this was huge.

fe. The first time is in the: 1960

Everyone evades taxes to some degree and I don’t think that is a secret. Not everybody is being constantly being followed. The second time he goes to prison, the primary reason was for running a gambling organization. And there again, I mean he’s got guys working for him as bookies and runners and stuff like that taking bets from people. It adds up to a significant amount of money and he was making a good profit off it. But is that something that’s going to catch a lot of attention otherwise. If I’m out there running a gambling pool, if I don’t if I don’t already have the FBI following me around is anybody going to care? Not as much, probably.

So I definitely think being followed and targeted makes you more likely to get caught for crap that other people would get away with. They never caught him in a murder. Sometimes they were bugging his phone calls. He couldn’t do anything – if he said the wrong thing on the phone they could arrest him. It sets you up to definitely be busted more.

Anything else you want to add to this one. No, we got a nice overview of the Top 10 Hoodlum List.

That concludes this mini episode of the Milwaukee Mafia. We will be back next week with another mini episode and Gavin if you want to go ahead and hit them up with a little contact info.

You can find me at milwaukeemafia.com. There is a lot of writing on there about pretty much everything the mob did between the 60s and 90s that’s not in the books yet.