Frank Costello dead

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33155, 20 February 1973, Page 13

Frank Costello dead

(A Z Ptess Assn—Copyright) NEW YORK, Feb. 19. I Frank Costello, the nattily-dressed American racketeer the Government could not deport and the Mob did not kill has died in a New York I hospital, after nine years of apparently respectable ; obscurity, at the age of 82. ! The former “Prime Minister of the Underworld,” and boss of several multi-million-dollar slot-machine and bootlegging rackets, spent his last years as a fashionable man about town. The authorities believe that the Mob dealt Costello out after he had survived an attempted assassination in 1957 and had refused to

identify his assailant: the bul- ' let only grazed Costello’s; scalp as he entered his apart - ! ment building off Central Park. The shooting was said to .have occurred after a power; struggle for control of the ! Mafia in America. I In May, 1957. Costello was! 'sentenced to five years imiprisonment for income tax; ;evasion. In spite of many! ;arrests and convictions, he! iserved a total of only about! (eight years in prisons. I Costello moved out of the (normally hushed world of the! (Mafia and on to the nation’s: television screens in 1951. when he testified before a ! Senate Investigations Subcommittee in New York. Television cameras showed the grey-haired, expensivelv dressed Costello entering the hearing, but he invoked constitutional privilege, and refused to be televised during his testimony. The cameras

. focused on his hands, which often tapped tensely on the desk as he underwent interrogation. The Government tried in vain for 14 years to deport 'him to his native Italy, where it had sent his friends, the ; late Charles (“Lucky”) Luciano and Joe Adonis. Costello had left Italy in 1895, when he was four (years old, and New York was inis home. He fought to re-j 'main in the city, where his! daily round included the Waldorf-Astoria barber’s] shop and the Biltmore Hotel : steam room. Costello won his case! against deportation in the Supreme Court in 1961: the Court held that he could not be deoorted for crimes committed while he was a naturalised citizen, even though! his citizenship was later re-! voked for having been obtained under false presences.