Apalachin meeting raided by police

The Apalachin meeting raided by police was a November 1957 gathering of mob leaders that became a national scandal and a turning point in public awareness of organized crime. Russell Bufalino had helped organize the meeting, and Frank Sheeran unknowingly drove him to the town. The police raid transformed what Sheeran remembered as an ordinary drop-off into a revelation: the man he had befriended was a powerful figure in a criminal network extending across the country.

Background and purpose

The meeting was called in the aftermath of the October 1957 killing of Albert Anastasia, a mob leader shot while seated in a barber’s chair with a hot towel over his face at the Park-Sheraton Hotel in New York. Bufalino helped arrange the gathering of godfathers in Apalachin, a small town in upstate New York. The stated purpose in the account was to settle problems that might have erupted following Anastasia’s murder.

The meeting also came at a moment when the existence of a national organized-crime network remained publicly disputed. For years, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had assured the public that no such organization existed, while directing the bureau’s major resources toward suspected Communists. Government wiretaps used the name La Cosa Nostra, meaning “this thing of ours,” for the organization. The Apalachin gathering would make the question of a national network much harder to dismiss.

Sheeran’s drive to Apalachin

Before the meeting, Sheeran had driven Bufalino to places where he had business throughout New York and Pennsylvania, as well as in northern New Jersey and New York City. Bufalino would call from upstate and ask Sheeran to take him somewhere; Sheeran often waited in the car while Bufalino conducted business in a house, bar, or restaurant. He enjoyed Bufalino’s company and did not ask him for money, though he later understood that being seen with Bufalino helped him.

In November 1957, Bufalino asked Sheeran to drive him to Apalachin. He said that after the meeting he would go to Erie and then Buffalo, and that he already had transportation arranged for the rest of the journey back to his home in Kingston. Sheeran dropped him at a house in Apalachin and, by his account, saw nothing unusual. He did not yet know that he had driven his friend to a meeting of national importance.

The next day, news of the gathering and the arrests filled the papers and television. Sheeran read the reports and recognized Bufalino among those arrested. The revelation changed how he interpreted the trips he had made with him: the stops at houses, bars, and restaurants were not simply personal errands but part of a system in which business was conducted face to face and in cash, rather than over the telephone or through banks.

The raid and public exposure

Police in Apalachin had become suspicious of the activity around the meeting place and raided the house. Fifty-eight of the most powerful mobsters in America were seized and taken into custody; roughly fifty others escaped through the woods. The raid, in the book’s account, did the mob far more harm than good. A gathering intended to settle internal problems instead made the organization visible to the country.

The publicity coincided with the televised McClellan Committee hearings on organized crime in the United States Senate. Viewers saw mobsters in diamond pinkie rings confer quietly with their lawyers, then face the senators and Bobby Kennedy. Witnesses invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to questions carrying accusations of murder, torture, and other serious crimes. The formulaic refusal to answer became familiar to the public, which often took it as an admission of guilt. Apalachin and the hearings together brought organized crime into homes in a way newspaper reports alone could not.

For Sheeran, the exposure also recast his own place in the story. He had been close to Bufalino before he understood the scale of his friend’s power: he knew Bufalino’s wife, Mary knew Bufalino’s wife, Bufalino asked after Sheeran’s children, and the two men shared wine and food. Sheeran brought him prosciutto bread and sausages; Bufalino gave him gallons of homemade red wine. After the arrests made their association public, Sheeran said, he no longer saw Bufalino downtown for a while, and Bufalino stopped calling him for drives. Sheeran understood this as an effort to avoid publicity.

Consequences and later significance

The publicity surrounding Apalachin helped shift the public understanding of organized crime. The book describes the meeting as the moment the mob came out into public view unwillingly; even Hoover came to acknowledge the organization, which was known as La Cosa Nostra. Bufalino, despite helping organize the gathering, remained unlike the public image of a flamboyant crime boss. The account describes him as quiet and easy to mistake for an ordinary Italian immigrant, while placing him among the men whose approval mattered to the organization’s major decisions.

The exposure was followed by an effort by the Justice Department to deport Bufalino and his close ally Carlos Marcello. Bufalino had arrived in the United States as an infant, and deportation proceedings and appeals continued for fifteen years. Sheeran later recommended a lawyer who pursued the matter through the Italian government; after Bufalino’s final appeal failed and he had packed his bags and bought tickets, the Italian government refused to accept him, and he remained in the United States.

The event also acquired a darker meaning in the book’s larger account. Years later, in a room with Jimmy Hoffa’s family at a lakeside cottage, the FBI found a yellow pad beside Hoffa’s telephone bearing the penciled words “Russ & Frank.” The phrase linked Bufalino and Sheeran in the family’s fear that only someone trusted could have approached the vigilant Hoffa closely enough to harm him; the two men became leading suspects in his disappearance. The Apalachin episode thus serves both as Sheeran’s awakening to Bufalino’s reach and as an early public marker of the relationship that would later draw them into the Hoffa investigation.