as taking place one month before Dodge Ridge. What Luette recalls about the wedding day itself is that she was very young and very drunk and that she wore a sleeveless, blue chiffon dress. She also had on the three-carat diamond ring Morris had given her.
“I was uncomfortable,” Luette stated in describing how she felt on her wedding day. “I knew he was only marrying me because he thought he was going to prison.” There was someone else Luette was interested in, but she pushed him aside because she was marrying Morris. Luette believes the wedding date was selected because Ettleman was away at the time on a trip and that it was all part of her mother’s orchestration.
Dillon, by then a Vietnam vet, served as best man. He wore his typical attire: a cowboy hat over shoulder length hair, a Wyatt Earp coat down to below his calves and, like his former mentor, Jimmy Ing, he wore two shoulder holsters hidden underneath the coat.
Dillon’s own career in crime began when he was a youngster. His father, an electrical engineer, turned to burglary during the Great Depression. When Dillon was still in grade school, his father and his uncle took him on jobs because he could crawl through spaces they could not. Soon Dillon got to be so good at what he did that his father and uncle sent him to break into stores and houses on his own while they waited for him in a nearby tavern. Eventually, the family moved to Colorado, where an uncle had close ties to Scotty Spinuzzi—the very same Colorado boss with whom Ettleman came to have a close relationship, both personally and professionally.
Born March 26, 1910, in Pueblo, Colorado, Joseph “Scotty” Spinuzzi was approximately thirteen years older than Ettleman. Like many twentieth century mobsters, his criminal activities also grew out of the Prohibition Era. By the time he was in his early forties, the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce highlighted him as a link between Al Capone’s and Frank Costello’s criminal empires in Chicago and New York. In his late forties, Scotty Spinuzzi accompanied the then Pueblo boss, James “Black Jim” Coletti, to the Appalachian meeting in upstate New York, now known as a summit of one hundred top Mafiosi from the United States, Canada and Italy.6
The Appalachian meeting was to be held on the property of Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara. It was intended to be a “good ole boys” barbeque party, where participants had a chance to establish or re-establish relationships. But it became a fiasco after local law enforcement grew suspicious when they noticed the arrival of very expensive cars with out-of-state plates in their tiny jurisdiction. A raid ensued which resulted in the arrest of sixty underworld bosses, causing embarrassment for the Sicilian organization.7
The police raid exposed the Mafia or “La Cosa Nostra” (LCN), another name for the Sicilian-run mob which translates to “Our Thing” in English, as it is sometimes called in the United States. In the process it embarrassed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who claimed there was no such thing as the Mafia.
When he was young, Scotty Spinuzzi was known for his dark good looks. He also had a reputation for being vicious in a fight. A former Pueblo cop, John J. Knocilja, Jr., who arrested Spinuzzi several times, said this about him: “Scotty was a mean devil. He was mean. [He] was a good sized man. He’d Sunday punch you, but he could stand up and fist fight with you too. He got to be low key [later in life], but this guy used to get in fights, he’d pistol-whip people.” But the most astonishing account surrounding Spinuzzi’s life is how he literally got away with murder, for it reflects both his power and his madness.8
On September 15, 1960, Spinuzzi was hanging out at Pueblo’s Five Queens Club with a friend, Harry Ricci, and Joseph Parloato, the club’s manager. On that day, the club’s twenty-nine-year-old African-American pianist, James D. Scott, had two of his buddies, who were Air Force servicemen, visiting him from Colorado Springs. There was also a white woman in their company.
The story gets hazy here, for some reports allege the problem arose when Scott danced with the woman and others claim the argument started when the two servicemen and their female companion got into an argument with the bartender over twenty-five cents they dropped into an unplugged jukebox. Scott joined the argument. Parloato and Ricci then forcibly removed the four men from the club’s premises. Outside the door, the verbal confrontation continued. Spinuzzi followed the group outside, threatening to “blow their brains out” if they did not leave the grounds completely. As Scott’s pals started to take off in their vehicle, Spinuzzi turned ferocious. Holding a pistol to the young pianist’s head, he kicked and hit him. Scott tried to wrestle away, but fell backward and Spinuzzi fell on top of him. Then a shot was heard. Still holding the gun, Spinuzzi pushed himself up off Scott and fled the scene.
The crime might have gone totally unnoticed had police officers who were conducting routine patrol work not turned the corner in their patrol car and spotted the two servicemen from Colorado Springs putting Scott’s body in the trunk of their car. The officers stopped Scott’s friends and soon saw the man in the trunk was dead. They immediately put the “freeze” on everything.
In Spinuzzi’s trial for the murder of James D. Scott, Judge George Blickhahn ruled that there was insufficient evidence to try Spinuzzi and issued a directed verdict of not guilty. Blickhahn was quoted as instructing the jury, “Nothing can be left to conjecture” and no one saw who fired the shot that killed Scott. No witness came forward to state otherwise.
The joke around town started that Spinuzzi got off because “no one saw the bullet leave the gun.” The FBI also believed that Spinuzzi received sanction and protection from local law enforcement authorities, because the Mafia net was cast widely in Colorado. Eventually, the Colorado Supreme Court chastised Blickhahn for his verdict, but it ruled that a retrial would constitute double jeopardy (a procedural clause in the Fifth Amendment forbidding a defendant from being tried again on the same or similar charges following a legitimate acquittal or conviction).
Mafia criminal activities during Scotty Spinuzzi’s rise to power were divided into two ruling factions in Colorado: Denver and Pueblo. Dick Kreck, author of Smaldone: The Untold Story of An American Crime Family, confirms that the “real” Mafia was in Pueblo. Denver came to be ruled by two brothers: Clyde Smaldone, who was the head of the crime family from the thirties until his retirement in the sixties, and Eugene “Checkers” Smaldone. The latter was said to be the tougher of the Smaldone brothers. The relationship between the crime families in Pueblo and Denver was friendly and cooperative. The Smaldone family was also closely aligned with the Kansas City mob, as was the Pueblo crime family.9
Until 1969, Pueblo was ruled by James “Black Jim” Coletti, who was a part-time owner with New York City Mafia boss Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno of the Colorado Cheese Company in Pueblo and Trinidad. When Coletti retired, Scotty Spinuzzi took over the reins. And with Spinuzzi’s meteoric rise, Ettleman’s clout also skyrocketed among the top leadership in the Mafia. Ettleman knew which shooting star to latch onto.
Etttleman found newlyweds Ralph and Luette Morris an apartment in Stockton, where he frequently stayed with them when conducting criminial activities in the region. During this period, he was active in running stolen credit card rings.10
A couple of post offices were hit by Ettleman’s crew in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was not only the cash and stamps that were taken, but also a series of credit cards. Fenced stamps brought in 80 percent of their value. But the credit cards that were stolen in the post office heists circulated as far south as Texas and Oklahoma.
The Texas-California connection and the movement of Ettleman’s stolen credit cards may be explained by Ed Reid, who in his book, The Grim Reapers, states that Los Angeles boss Nick Licata’s dominion stretched from Los Angeles to San Diego and into Texas, where in Dallas, Licata shared the rule with Joe Civello, an importer of food and liquor and the head of a Dallas crime family. He was the same Joe Civello whose personal acquaintance, Jack Ruby, murdered presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald
