Vincent "Jimmy Doyle" Plumeri was born in 1903 in Rigobuto, Sicily, and arrived in the United States as a six-month-old child aboard the passenger ship SS City of Naples. He was naturalized in 1926.
He was raised on Manhattan's Lower East Side, living on Broome Street in Little Italy. As an adult he moved to the exclusive Upper East Side, where he would remain for the rest of his life. By 1951 he also kept a second residence in Surfside, Florida, which he frequented for decades.
Plumeri was a hoodlum with a quick wit and a quicker temper. If he liked you, he would go out of his way to help you. If he did not, he would go out of his way to make you pay.
He was known as an extremely sharp dresser, wearing the finest clothes money could buy: custom handmade white-on-white monogrammed shirts with wide dagger collars, silk and sharkskin suits from Saks and Company, and diamond rings, watches, and stick pins. One look at Jimmy Doyle and you immediately knew who and what he was. He was a died-in-the-wool wiseguy through and through.
He married young to his wife, Mary, to whom he remained married for more than 40 years. He also kept a longtime mistress named Vicki Gargiulo, who had her own FBI record and lived across the city on the West Side. Vicki was a beautiful, sharp, knock-around girl who knew the score and always had Jimmy's back through the years. She is believed to have been a showgirl at the Copacabana before Jimmy Doyle took her as his girlfriend.
Plumeri's activities included government racketeering, labor union racketeering, extortion, the prize fight racket, shylocking, and strong-arm tactics. He was a close associate of many of the country's top hoodlums, including family boss Tommy Lucchese and his nephews John, Frank, and Tommy Dioguardi.
Another nephew, Thomas "Tommy Flowers" Plumeri, later became active with his uncle and cousins. Lepke Buchalter, the infamous co-leader of Murder Inc., was also among his associates. Pittston-Scranton mafia boss Russ Buffalino was a very close associate of Plumeri in garment operations, as were many of his Pennsylvania crew minions. Plumeri and Buffalino associated on a weekly basis for decades.
The iconic Genovese soldier and top garment power Joe Stracci divided up the district with Jimmy and other top hoods to keep the balance of power. Among the Bergatas was Maurice "Mo" Klamus, a Jewish hood, extortionist, and head of a truckers association created and operated by Plumeri and Johnny Dio. Klamus was installed as a front man.
Arthur Racco Monte, another old-time Genovese hoodlum, was a Plumeri associate, as were Anthony Trozzini, David Wengner, Samuel "Sam" Berger, and John "Jack" McCarthy. These men were close hoodlum associates active in the labor movement, installed as union officials or working behind the scenes as consultants under Plumeri's influence.
Plumeri also had many more mob minions under his control, including the top Lucchese family power "Little Eddie" Coco, head of the boxing rackets and a close friend to Jimmy. Philadelphia-based mafioso Frank "Blinky" Palermo was a top fight game racketeer and Plumeri partner.
Paul "Frankie" Carbo, often misidentified as a Lucchese member, was a Genovese soldier close to Plumeri. Carbo was a fight game racketeer and old-line Murder Inc. executioner who was a prime suspect in the Bugsy Siegel hit. Harry "Champ" Siegel was a top Jewish hood and gambler, a Plumeri associate, and a garment racketeer.
Peter DeFeo was an important Genovese capo based on Elizabeth Street and a close friend to Jimmy for years. Abraham "Abed" Chait was a government and top labor racketeer who controlled trucking rackets for the Jewish segment of the mob and was a friendly competitor to Jimmy. Barney Fishgoal was a garment strong-arm convicted of murder in 1922, and Dutch Goldberg was a garment center extortionist, murderer, and key member of the Jewish mob.
Jimmy Doyle knew virtually everybody there was to know in the mob. A Tommy Lucchese contemporary, Button Guys believes that at one time Plumeri might have been considered boss material and a potential successor to Lucchese himself before his fall from grace.
Plumeri's first arrest was in 1913 for delinquency. He later had arrests for transporting liquor, vagrancy, traffic violations, disorderly conduct, burglary, criminally receiving stolen property, murder by gunshot, felonious assault, coercion and conspiracy, extortion, malicious mischief, conspiracy and assault, murder investigation, income tax evasion, illegal kickbacks, conspiracy and antitrust violation, conspiracy to defraud, mail fraud, and bribery. He served three prison terms for burglary, extortion, and income tax fraud.
In 1933 he was arrested for killing his garment trucking racket partner Dominic DiCarlo DeDado in a gunfight in their downtown office. Plumeri was also wounded in the exchange of shots but was later acquitted based on a self-defense argument. His nephew Johnny Dio was the only eyewitness to the shooting.
During the 1930s Plumeri adopted the nickname Jimmy Doyle when he became a fight manager. He soon accumulated a stable of a dozen prize fighters and would be a major force in the boxing rackets through the 1940s and 1950s. Governor Thomas Dewey once called Plumeri and his notorious nephew Johnny Dio two of the most powerful gangsters in the city.
Years later, in 1958, Senator Robert Kennedy, during the famed Senate rackets committee probe, asked Jimmy if he had tried to throw a nightclub singer out of a high-rise window because he would not marry a young lady Plumeri had asked him to. Jimmy Doyle chuckled while pleading his Fifth Amendment privilege. He would go on to take the Fifth on every question from there on out about labor union racketeering.
By the late 1920s Plumeri had become a well-known extortionist and garment center hoodlum. He was alleged to have become an inducted member of the old Reina, later Gagliano, family. This group would then morph into and become known as the Lucchese family. By the 1940s Plumeri would rise to the status of capo di decina, but even during his tenure as a soldier the vast rackets he came to control and the resources available to him gave him a status far above the average soldier.
He was closely associated early on with such dangerous industrial racketeers as Lepke Buchalter and his sidekick and partner Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro. Plumeri would work and partner with them in the various garment shakedowns and rackets of the day. Together they would exercise a campaign of terror that brought the entire garment center to its knees and gave them all-consuming racket dominion over garment makers and garment carriers alike.
Jimmy Doyle eventually came to hold ownership interests or silent partnerships in several major garment trucking companies over the years. One of his largest trucking firms was called L&G Carriers Corporation. Another was Barton Trucking Company. Both were located in the heart of the garment center.
These two firms were dominant players for years in the hauling of garments throughout the New York City metropolitan area and as far away as Allentown and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. By the early 1950s he had partnered with several top Pittston mafiosi such as Russ Buffalino, Dominic "Nicki" Alaimo, and Angelo Sciandra in several dress factories in both the Pittston-Scranton area and in New York City. They in turn utilized his garment carrier and trim supply firms.
These apparel carriers were among the most important in the industry, holding lock and key government manufacturing accounts for D.C. Originally starting out operating a shakedown extortion racket aimed at dress carriers in New York's garment district, Jimmy Doyle quickly escalated his activities. He infiltrated and gained a percentage of ownership through terror tactics and the tremendous pressure he was able to bring down on victim companies.
He did this through his influence in several government labor unions, including the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, specifically Local 102. Its president, Sam Berger, was a Plumeri henchman. Plumeri also had an interest in a button and trimming supply firm so important to every dress manufacturer's finished product.
Zippers, buttons, snaps, needles and thread, clasps, clothes hangers, and more were mandatory supplies regardless of the type of apparel designed and stitched out. This company was named the Seam Binding Corporation and was based in the heart of the garment district. It would supply many major garment houses.
Plumeri also brought his young nephews into the fold, the Dioguardi brothers Johnny, Frankie, and Tommy, better known as the Dio brothers. They were notorious young hoodlums and aspiring labor racketeers under the guiding hand and tutelage of their dear uncle Jimmy. Of the three, Johnny Dio would arguably become the most well-known and venerable labor union corrupter in the nation.
Jimmy and his nephew would form several truckers associations over the years. All trucking firms actively hauling garments and varied textiles were subject to domination and control. They had little choice. You either joined his association or else. That or else often came in the form of sugar in gas tanks, broken windshields, firebombed trucks, getting your head cracked open, or all of the above.
Garment manufacturers and their sister subcontracting factories fell in line or suffered suspicious arson fires in their shops, burglaries where sewing machines and equipment were damaged, or arrogant union organizers and business agents who came around threatening to either unionize a shop or enforce heavy-handed labor contracts that were stifling in their demands. Before long most everyone operating within the New York City garment district knew the score and acquiesced accordingly, so as to get along and, if not thrive, then at least comfortably survive in an industry where profits could be slim pickings to begin with.
For those savvier garment executives willing to play ball and maybe even jump into the pond with the friendlier racketeers, they often willingly became partners with the Jewish and Italian hoods, and mutually beneficial arrangements grew their companies in a profit-sharing agreement. Both Plumeri and Johnny Dio would each be repeatedly charged with extortion, coercion, and related criminal counts in 1932 and 1933 for their shakedown activities in this field. But it was not until 1937 that an airtight extortion case forced them to each take a guilty plea. Both were sentenced to Sing Sing for three to five years on the state extortion conviction.
Jimmy Doyle also kept a profitable hand over the years in the fight racket in partnership with fellow Lucchese member "Little Eddie" Coco and another notorious mafioso named Paul "Frankie" Carbo. The three, after working in tandem with Philadelphia's own Blinky Palermo, controlled a stable of boxers over the years that saw more than a few of their fighters enter big money title fights.
Another steady income came from a healthy and robust loansharking business Jimmy ran. He was well known for being available to lend large sums of money on short notice to cash-strapped dress manufacturers and restaurant owners who had fallen on hard times and could not access needed funds. In this manner Jimmy was able to leverage his position as a creditor to gain an interest in several night spots over the years in both New York City and Miami, Florida. Money owed from recalcitrant borrowers, coupled with his notorious reputation as a top mafia member, was not to be ignored or toyed with.
One of his investments was said to be Angelo Palangi's restaurant and pizzeria in Miami Beach. Palangi's was a spin-off of a popular, well-known Queens venue. He partnered with Palangi and his nephew Frankie Dio in this deal. Dio had relocated to Miami from Jackson Heights, Queens, several years earlier and was fast establishing himself as a mob power in the Sunshine State.
By the late 1960s Jimmy Plumeri had immersed himself in promoting loans to various big businessmen and corporations from the Teamsters' enormous multi-million dollar pension fund. Typically working behind the scenes in these types of affairs, mobsters would negotiate cash kickbacks from borrowers for using their influence in getting loans approved. These kickbacks could and did often amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars on loan applications in excess of many millions of dollars. Las Vegas casinos and major private and public companies often sought out the mafiosi for this purpose.
Jimmy Doyle would eventually be swept up in a far-reaching FBI investigation and subsequent federal indictment for Teamster loan abuse and corruption. In March 1970 Plumeri was among a group of businessmen, corrupt Teamster officials, and several top mafiosi from several families nailed on embezzlement, mail and wire fraud, and related conspiracy counts for their efforts to solicit, facilitate, and execute the fraudulent loan schemes. They were accused of conspiring to use bribery and coercion to induce the Teamster Central States Pension Fund to issue loans to various business firms.
Known union hood Samuel Berger, head of the Plumeri-controlled Master Truckmen's Association and former manager of Local 102 of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, was part of this indictment. He and two others reportedly divvied up one hundred thousand dollars in kickbacks for arranging the loans.
A few months earlier, in another huge back-to-back indictment out of Washington, the FBI arrested Plumeri and nine other top mafiosi from the Genovese, Lucchese, Pittsburgh, and Detroit families. Those arrested included Salvatore "Little Sally" Celembrino, Edward "Eddie Buff" Lanzieri, Salvatore "Sally Burns" Granello, Frank Rosa, Pittsburgh boss Sebastian John LaRaca, Gabriel "Kelly" Mannarino, Joseph Cica, Dominic "Fatam" Corrado, and "Big Frank" Amato.
Plumeri was charged with corrupting various Teamster pension funds around the country to obtain kickbacks through illegal loans and over 1.2 million dollars made by the funds. Still earlier indictments citing the same pension loan fraud type schemes were charged back in 1968 and 1969. Plumeri had been named along with veteran labor racketeer Jack McCarthy and several other hoods.
Plumeri would later be convicted on seven related indictments for all these various kickbacks and tax evasions and sentenced to a total of 14 years across the board in federal prison. But the judge suspended the entire sentence because of Jimmy Plumeri's ill health. What a score he made.
Jimmy Plumeri was a top racketeer for upwards of five decades, well respected and heavily involved in many of the mob's most important rackets, and a trusted confidant of family boss Tommy Lucchese himself. That makes the rest of his life story all the more confusing.
On a quiet morning in 1971, 68-year-old Vincenzo "Jimmy Doyle" Plumeri was found murdered on a desolate street in an industrial area of Maspeth, Queens. A plastic bag was wrapped tightly around his head and his silk necktie was pulled around his neck, having been used by his killer or killers to garrote and smother the old hoodlum until the loss of oxygen finished him off. It was a method Plumeri himself knew well, no doubt, and possibly used on his own murder victims throughout the years.
Why he was killed is anyone's guess. Speculation ran from him having turned snitch, to being set up and killed by his own nephew Johnny Dio after a bad falling out, to higher-ups in both the Genovese and Lucchese clans deciding to tidy up possible loose ends in another Teamster fund kickback trial, possibly afraid of what Plumeri could say if he chose to open up and violate omerta.
It was speculated that because he was getting older he might not have been able to withstand a long prison sentence should the judge have hammered the defendants with heavy jail terms. When he received a suspended sentence for his conviction on bribery and kickback charges, with the judge citing Plumeri's ill health for going so easy on the notorious mafioso, some in the underworld felt he may have become an informer. Button Guys would not like to believe that.
In the often murky politics of the underworld, guys get caught up in mob intrigues, plots, and subplots enough to fall prey. Button Guys believes that is what might have happened here. At any rate, Jimmy Doyle's harsh and brutal ending surprised many in both law enforcement and the mob who knew him intimately. It was an abrupt ending to what had been a stellar underworld career.
Had Tommy Lucchese not died several years earlier in 1967, he might have saved Jimmy. But with Lucchese's passing, it seems the powers that be gave a thumbs down on Jimmy for whatever reason, and there was no one left to veto the hit.