Bompensiero had no choice but to hang tough and take his medicine. It would have cost him his life if he did not, because of the other mafia figures who could have been dragged into the case. And the organization was not thrilled that Bompensiero put Mafia members in this predicament. Three months after Bompensiero’s trial, a Mafia elder, Anthony Pinelli, called Bompensiero a “dumb hoodlum.” It was a careless slip Bompensiero had committed. Who takes and then cashes a five-thousand-dollar bribe in the form of a check? It appears that the system was so blatant, Bompensiero got too comfortable with it. But it cost him dearly.
Shortly after he was sentenced to prison, Bompensiero’s first wife died. He was allowed to attend her funeral handcuffed, with a police escort. When he got out of prison, he married the widow of his former close friend Girolamo “Momo” Adamo, a long time underboss to Jack Dragna. Adamo might have been boss of Los Angeles had Frank DeSimone not usurped the number one spot when he took over Southern California after Jack Dragna’s death.
It has been insinuated that the vote giving DeSimone the leadership was rigged. For one, DeSimone visited Bompensiero in prison to get his vote. He left claiming Bompensiero gave it to him. This wasn’t true but Bompensiero did not challenge it. He was in no position to do so. In Bompensiero’s view, Adamo possessed far more experience within the organization than DeSimone did. No doubt he would have preferred that Adamo had lived and ruled in place of DeSimone.
It is not surprising that DeSimone took over the reins of the Los Angeles crime family. He was of a different pedigree from Adamo or for that matter Frank Bompensiero, who dropped out of Andrew Jackson Elementary School in Milwaukee in the third grade. Frank DeSimone’s father was a don, heading an Italian crime family in 1922, which formed the seedling of the future Los Angeles crime families to come. DeSimone, referred to as “One Eyed,” because one of his eyes drooped, was himself a graduate of the University of Southern California Law School. A practicing criminal lawyer, his mobster clients included Jack Dragna, “Momo” Adamo, Jimmy Fratianno and Bompensiero.
John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli was another DeSimone client. Mafia buffs know Roselli as the man hired by the CIA in the 1960s to kill Fidel Castro. Roselli took the CIA’s money, but considered it too dangerous to go to Cuba. He is also alleged to have been the actual gunman who shot and killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. His main role during the prime of his career was to control Hollywood and Las Vegas for the Chicago outfit. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin sponsored Roselli for membership in the Beverly Hills Friar’s Club, where he became involved in a card cheating ring. This led to a court case and threatened deportation, causing his shining star to plummet rapidly.9
When DeSimone came to power, he demoted Bompensiero to the rank of soldier. He also demoted Adamo to that rank. And if one is to believe a police informant, DeSimone forced Adamo to watch while he raped Adamo’s wife, Marie. Traumatized and humiliated, months later Adamo shot Marie in the head during a heated argument and then fatally shot himself. Marie survived, but lost one eye. Rumors spread that Marie was having an affair during their marriage, and that it was this that most likely led to Adamo’s humiliation and eventually caused him to shoot his wife and then himself.10
Bompensiero was locked down in San Quentin when this happened. But one must wonder what he thought when he got the news, since many abusive husbands were found beaten to death in Sicilian neighborhoods of San Diego. Bompensiero was suspected by some locals to have played the role of that avenger, leaving a trail of widows behind. He had no tolerance for men who abused women. There are those who believe it was Bompensiero who had the affair with Marie Adamo. Judith Moore, in her series on Frank Bompensiero, wrote about this: Bompensiero’s daughter and only child recalled that her mother had predicted that if something ever happened to her, she could envision Marie Adamo going after Bompensiero. Marie was a pretty and flirtatious woman in her younger days and that was not lost on those around her. But after “Momo” Adamo’s suicide, she married a Navy officer.
Because of his demotion to soldier by DeSimone, Bompensiero kept his distance from the Los Angeles family. But he was not silent about his feelings toward DeSimone and his group, which included Underboss Nick Licata and Jack Dragna’s nephew, Louis Tom Dragna: he referred to them as “pezzi de merde” or “pieces of shit.” His disillusionment with the Mafia organization, at least in Los Angeles, appeared to be complete by then.
In The San Diego Reader, Judith Moore wrote:
After Frank DeSimone’s takeover of the Los Angeles family, this army to which Bompensiero had allied himself for almost four decades was no longer noble. It had outlived its reason for being. It had become something that was not in favor of justice. What remained must have seemed to Bompensiero not an army of Sicilian men of honor, but a backbiting crew of coarse American thugs and goons. 11
Bompensiero’s daughter told Moore, “I used to ask my father, ‘Daddy, what is the Mafia?’ And he’d say, ‘Honey, what are you talking about? That’s the olden days; no such thing anymore as the Mafia. No such thing. All a bunch of bullshit.’”12
Upon Bompensiero’s release from San Quentin in May 1960, his brother drove up to Marin County to pick him up and drive him back to San Diego. Bompensiero’s release was followed by a five-year probation. Part of his parole regimen was that he had to keep away from bars and restaurants where liquor was served. Not only was he no longer allowed to work in a bar, but he was not allowed to own one. Bompensiero floated around trying out different gigs to give him the appearance of working, for he had to show he was making an honest living and not supporting himself through illegal activity. He got a part-time job at famous radio and TV personality Art Linkletter’s son’s fruit company, but this did not last long once the younger Linkletter, Jack, learned who Bompensiero was. Jack Linkletter told Bompensiero that he could not work there, because Jack could not be tainted by Bompensiero’s reputation. Bompensiero, Jack Linkletter recalls, was polite and told him he understood and left. But privately he was cursing.13
Then, Jimmy Fratianno came up with a scheme involving a project in the Central Valley of California. It offered Bompensiero an opportunity to cover his parole board requirements, even though it constituted long daily travel during the week from San Diego to El Centro. But now he had a legal job: he was a representative of the Fratianno Trucking Company that entered into subcontracts to haul dirt on an hourly basis for Central Valley highway construction.
To cut back on the long commute, at times Bompensiero stayed with Fratianno in a two-bedroom motel suite where, unbeknownst to the two men, the FBI set up listening devices.14
Jimmy Fratianno’s scheme featured many twists and turns. The California Public Utilities Commission’s tariff regulations prescribed minimum hourly and tonnage rates for hauling. But in an effort to circumvent these regulations, Jimmy Fratianno determined that the number of hours charged for hauling was based on the number of loads hauled rather than the actual hours consumed. He had devised a “guideline” chart, which converted the number of loads hauled to the number of hours of hauling. He required his truck drivers to submit freight bills at the end of each day showing the number of hours of hauling in conformity with the guideline charts he formulated. The truckers had a tough time meeting the stringent goals. The state contract also provided $4.78 per hour with time and a half for overtime. But the truck drivers hired by Fratianno received only $3.78. The bookkeeping was sloppily maintained, showing inaccurate records of the wages paid and containing falsified instances of overtime payment. In spite of the bookkeeping shenanigans and rules and regulations which served to tilt the figures in his favor, by mid-May of 1966 Fratianno was having trouble meeting the payroll.
Fratianno