Pay the Piranha

For eight weeks, the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee has held hearings on organized crime. A parade of witnesses, many of them for- mer mobsters, testifying with immunity, have sketched the outlines of gambling, theft and corruption on which crime empires are built. Last week big Vinnie Teresa, a rotund (300 Ibs.) loan shark now serving concurrent prison terms for stealing securities and car theft, provided a Runyonesque retrospective of his life and crimes:

> I was an officer in the Piranha Co. [a Boston loan-shark operation]. The name Piranha Co. was taken from the fish of that name, which is a maneater. We had a live one in a fishbowl in the place. We wanted to be known as a tough outfit: if anybody was slow in paying, we told him we'd stick his hand in the fishbowl. What do you think happened? The fish bit. We used to feed the thing a dozen live goldfish a day.

> We used to run gambling junkets all over the world. For example, we made arrangements in London at George Raft's Colony Club to bring people to gamble. They put in $1,000 apiece and received $820 back in gambling chips; we paid their hotel, food and airline charges. Naturally most of them lost money in the casinos, and we got 15% of their losses. It was very simple to take their money, probably because they are all very greedy. They paid very little for the junkets, but they usually gambled far more than they had expected they would. We didn't want anyone on the junkets who wasn't going to gamble. We didn't want tourists or "sun worshipers," as we called them.

> Gambling is the stand-by and the foundation [of organized crime]. From it come the corrupt politicians and policemen, the bribes and the payoffs, and sometimes murder. If you could crush gambling, you would put the Mob out of business. You'd have them back on the pushcarts as it was in the old days.

> There are only two ways to beat the loan shark. You can die or you can run away. If you come back in ten years, you'll find that you still owe the principal and the interest that's been piling up. The books never close.

> The word Mafia isn't used much any more. And I never heard the term Cosa Nostra until Joe Valachi* used it. But there is one big gang that runs organized crime in this country. It has many different names--the Organization, the Syndicate. We generally call it the Mob. New young people who become members call it the Outfit.

*A former Mafioso turned Government witness whose revelations at the 1963 Senate hearings provided the first insider's account of Mob activities.

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